Dawn
by CaptainKase
Summary: "Not t-to worry," he said cheerfully, even though the stutter sounded horribly out of place in Mustang's voice. "It went right through." Ed and Roy are stuck in a war zone. Gratuitous hurt!Roy for the sake of hurt!Roy ensues.
1. Crash and Burn

Alright. So my computer says I started this file one February 17, 2008. I finished what you see here about three days afterwards. I was writing this for **Sevlow **in response to her saying that I did not write enough hurt!Roy (before which I had told her that she wrote too much hurt!Roy, and demanded she write hurt!Ed -- she responded with **Sick **which just beat all the motivation out of me because _damn. _I mean seriously, have you read that story? _Damn._) So. If **Sevlow **happens to read this, know that all those times I told you I was writing your fic? Yeah, I really actually was. I just really, really despised what I was writing as I was writing it. As such, my motivation totally died out. I currently have another attempt somewhere that I started on March 19, 2008. XD; It got to approximately 10,000 words before it died as well. I'm going to post both, staggered, in an attempt to gain the motivation to finish a part two on both. Just sitting like a lump on my harddrive isn't helping these fics any.

So. Know that part two is not done and it won't come any faster if you pester me, because I am currently devoting a lot of my time to **Vagabonds. **However, it will probably come faster if you care to offer me some constructive criticism on this section or ideas for a second part. I really do have a rough outline written up, but I just hate everything I write for some reason. It's sorta a wonder I got this far, actually. I kept second-guessing myself after every sentence I wrote, and you'll see why in just a bit. ;D

Anyway, onto the gratutitous hurt!Roy and sick!Roy and papa!Roy (OH THE VERSATILITY OF ROY) and wangsty!Ed and possibly hurt-or-just-mildly-uncomfortable!Ed because let's face it, I just can't write something without hurt!Ed.

**Warnings: **Warfic, situations that may or may not make logical sense, gore, language.

**Enjoy!**

* * *

Things started out normal enough for a day in a war zone. Ed woke sad and cold and lonely, panting and gulping harshly into the pillow so that General Mustang, one tent-length away, wouldn't hear him. The night had seen the same old dream – Al dying in one grotesque way or another. Last night, it had been a landmine, and Ed swore he could still feel pieces of his brother's flesh clinging to the dirt-smudged uniform he had collapsed into bed in last night.

He crossed his arms and let them rub at each other slowly, some unconscious effort to rid himself of his brother's charred flesh – the automail chilled his left arm to the bone; he must have left the damn thing hanging outside the covers again. It was a stupid thing to do in sub-zero temperatures and it always left his shoulder aching fiercely, but he was just so _used_ to sleeping slung-out and careless, and Mustang never did bother to tuck his shirt down and un-sling his arms like Al always did, which he supposed was just as well, because that would be downright embarrassing.

Edward curled into a ball underneath his blanket – not nearly thick enough for these temperatures – and hoped silently for a moment that the reveille _wouldn't _sound this morning, that he could stay in bed and as close to warm as he would be all day for just a while longer, that he could just listen to the comforting rasp of Mustang's breathing across the room for just a few hours more. There was no way of gauging the time. Up here, it was dark nearly all the time during this season. They were far enough north that the sun only found them for a few hours at a time. His watch was still set on Rizenbul time because changing it would be like admitting this stupid war was going to keep going, and it _wasn't_, damn it. However, his time sense was good enough that he knew "morning" like he had an internal alarm clock, so either he was running early, or the reveille was running late.

Then, right on bloody cue, a trumpet sounded. Edward curled tighter and cursed it, every part of him aching to sleep again. Across the tent, Mustang groaned quietly and hacked a wet-sounding cough into his pillow. "Morning, kid," Mustang said softly. Edward didn't acknowledge him. He never did, this early. Mustang liked to think that he woke Edward every morning, liked to think that he was being merciful when he gave Edward an extra ten minutes after the reveille had sounded. It really was a nice gesture, but Ed always was awake, staring blankly at the dark of the underside of his coarse bed covers.

"That could be the last reveille we'll ever have to stomach. We'll be home soon. Any day now." And this was the reason that Edward pretended, to hear these assurances that Mustang would only give him when he thought he was asleep. "You'll be back to Alphonse soon, just wait." A tingle trilled its way up his spine. _Al_. So new and human when he'd gotten the call, so quick to dissolve into emotions with the feelings from his new body overwhelming him that Ed had needed to get on the train while he was still sleeping. He had tried not to compare himself to his father, creeping softly out the door while his family slept soundly upstairs –

"That's right," Mustang hummed something then, tunelessly.

Comfort.

And then another wet, hacking cough.

"Any day now."

The rasp of clothing stopped as Mustang finished putting on his uniform and Edward heard the heavy clunk of boots sound over his tuneless humming. This was the last part of his morning routine – he would be "waking" Ed soon, doubtless. Ed closed his eyes.

He heard Roy rise, heard his heavy footsteps against the tent's dirt floor. Edward tensed.

Suddenly, the blanket was flung back and there was a heavy, glove-covered hand ruffling his tousled hair. "Rise and shine, kiddo."

Just like every morning.

* * *

Edward shivered in the cold of the mess tent, yawned hugely, and hunched over his powdered scrambled eggs like a starving man. The strict ration system that the military stuck to during meals always left him sitting just on the wrong side of hunger, just enough to be uncomfortable, so he savored every bite he got.

He paused once during his meal, mid-bite, to think of Al. He checked his watch for Al time like he did every morning – reveille was around 0500 hours where Ed was, that made it around 0600 hours when he was eating breakfast (the delay was on account of the fact that Ed always had morning chores to do around camp before breakfast; melting snow off of people's tents, warming the water for showers – silly little trivial things that alchemists took advantage of). In Al time, it was around 1000 hours. He would be getting out of bed now, and hopefully he was warmer than Ed was. Rizembool was cold, but it wasn't bone-creaking, mind-numbing cold like Drachma.

He put his watch away and took the last bite of his eggs a little bit bitterly, savored the feel of it going down. His next meal wouldn't be for six more hours, but he could already feel the uncomfortable ache of his stomach. Around him, soldiers ate and laughed, talked like they weren't sitting on a tense border and waiting for a supply line that probably wouldn't come. Across the room, Ed saw a private throw away a tray with a small heap of eggs still lumped on it, and his stomach ached more fiercely.

He saw a private at the next table elbow his buddy and mimic Ed's earlier motions with the pocket watch – like Edward had been flaunting it instead of checking the time. The men at that table laughed loudly, uproariously, obnoxiously – and Ed's head ached as he gritted his teeth. Being an alchemist, he had a lot of clout in this camp, and he caught a lot of crap for it. He and the general were downright famous in their domain, the highest ranks in the camp. They shared one of the most luxurious (luxurious being a relative term here) lodgings on the outskirts of camp, hidden away from the bustle in the thickness of the surrounding forest. Conditions being so bleak, just their hard, springy cots, leaps above the cold winter ground everyone else had to manage, were enough to single them out for teasing. The general was too high in rank to catch the brunt of the verbal abuse, though, so Edward caught most of it alone.

Being a sixteen-going-on-seventeen-year-old state alchemist and a higher rank than most everyone around him wasn't easy either, and sometimes it was almost too much.

Nevermind. Give them someone to hate, Edward thought. Give them someone to make fun of. He would be the enemy so long as they weren't fighting among themselves.

He thought, vaguely, as a he scraped the remnants of liquid-egg from his tray, that he wouldn't have thought this way only a year earlier. He might have started a shouting match to defend his dignity (might have lost a large chunk of it in the process) but war had made him tired, and he was too exhausted and hungry and lonely and cold to work himself into a classic Edward Elric rant.

Maybe later, he thought.

* * *

Morning was filled by the tedious task of creating somewhere dry to stash the gunpowder. The Lieutenant who had asked him to do it seemed to think it was as easy as creating an underground cavern – and it_ was_ as easy as that, actually, but that wasn't quite as easy as it sounded. Moving earth was hard with his energy levels so depleted, just as finding an area large enough for a cavern was hard, just as making sure the damn thing was structurally sound was hard – as much as he hated almost every asshole in this camp, he didn't want the damn thing collapsing on them.

So he traced the perimeter in the snow with his boot for the better part of two hours while soldiers caught in the tedium of not being on the front line made themselves useless around him. There was a group of men having a snowball fight a few tents over, a group of men playing cards around a barrel fire near the mess, and God did Ed _envy_ them. When he was done charting the perimeter, he plotted the supports, traced an area for the stairs.

There.

He leaned down, clapped his hands, transmuted.

Focusing on the task at hand proved to be a difficult thing, but then he concentrated on the tent that the soldier from this morning inhabited here, and, well – the dirt from the hollowed ground had to find a place _somewhere_. Equivalent exchange – it wasn't just going to _disappear_. Edward grinned, and concentrating became a whole lot easier.

The blue glow dissipated, and somewhere across camp, an indignant cry rang out as a tent exploded in a column of hard, cold soil. It wasn't a classic Edward Elric rant, no, but he _was_ growing up. His revenge had become more refined – he wasn't going to admit that the transfer of hundreds of pounds of dirt under tons of pressure and half the length of the camp had damn near exhausted him, though.

He turned to the Lieutenant, grinning and gesturing the stairs with a grandiose sweep of his arm.

"All done!" he said. His shoulder ached.

* * *

"Fullmetal, fancy seeing you here," Mustang said, his condescending tone made weak and tired by all the same fatigues that Edward faced, only tenfold.

"I was just – "

"Having a bit of fun, were you?"

" – I."

"What did _this_ man do to impugn your honor? Hmm? More than the Sergeant whose tent you filled with snow last week, I hope."

"I..." Edward felt too tired to argue, and as strange as it sounded, he felt ashamed and small in front of this bleached, reduced General in contrast to the feirce defiance he had felt in the face of his strong, smirking Colonel. This General was his comfort, perhaps the only friend he had here. He didn't want that to stop. He needed him.

"Edward –" Mustang rubbed gently at the bridge of his nose. "I'm not going to say that he was entirely innocent, because I know you've been catching a lot of hell from everyone here. But this isn't the right place or time to act your age. I'm sorry." Mustang turned away for a moment and yanked a handkerchief from his pocket just in time to lean over the desk and cough one of his lungs into it. When he had finished and looked up, his eyes seemed a little fuzzy around the edges, rims of red obscuring the boundary between white and black. He sniffed once; he tried to make it haughty, but to Ed, it just sounded miserable.

"General..." _Are you okay? _danced temptingly on the tip of his tongue, but something told him it wouldn't be welcome.

"The fact of the matter is, you contaminated a portion of our meager food supply with your little scheme, and our health specialist isn't pleased. As such – " Mustang looked down, like he didn't like what was coming next, and clutched his handkerchief tighter in his hand. "As such, you'll be skipping dinner tonight while you load our powder kegs into your cellar yourself."

_No!_

"No! General – please –" It was edged with a plea, something Edward didn't normally do, and the General's face tightened perceptibly before he threw the hand holding the handkerchief into the air, finger pointed toward the mouth of his tent.

"You'd better get started. It'll be colder soon – lights out at 2200. We have an ungodly amount of powder – "

"General..." He coughed again, muffled it with his shoulder. It sounded bad – bad like some of the people the Rockbells had treated when he'd been a child –

"Go!" The general roared through his hacking.

He did.

* * *

_Dear Al,_

Ed's eyes drooped and his head nodded. His stomach twisted painfully within him, clawing angrily at his ribs and pleading for _food – _

The 'l' in Al made a crazy zig-zag down the page. Furiously erasing his scribble, Ed started again.

_Dear Al,_

_How're things with you? I'm fine but the bastard made a special point to be a extra bastardy today –_

Edward glanced at the mouth of the tent menacingly, like just writing about the General on paper would summon him.

_– and I didn't even do anything this time, honest._

Al wouldn't believe it for a second.

_Anyway I'm really hungry the bastard –_

Edward stopped, crossed that out. His stomach grumbled in disdain.

_My shoulder kinda hurts, I loaded –_

He crossed that out.

_Things really are going fine here. We haven't even been attacked yet. Everyone's pretty bored, actually._

There, a happy medium between the whole and the half truth. It always was best to sugarcoat things with Al. He hadn't gotten a letter in return yet, didn't even know if the countless letters he'd sent since he'd arrived here had made it – communication lines out of Drachma were precarious at best – but if they did, Ed really didn't want his brother to worry.

He yawned again, stretching over his chicken-scratched piece of paper. He was getting tired enough that his writing was becoming near illegible.

Just as he decided that Al's letter could wait a night, the flap of the tent flew forward, sending bone-chilling wafts of air into the little space. Edward burrowed deeper, curled under his sleeping bag and glared at the open mouth of the tent. Roy didn't look at him, didn't speak to him, but he cut a quick path across the enclosed space to Edward's bunk and dropped something from his pocket onto the open page of Edward's notebook.

Edward – blinked. Suddenly, where only hasty words had been before, there were two sad, flat-looking biscuits. Ed's stomach did a little flip of absolute ecstasy within him, and before he even thought to thank the General, he was ripping off great hunks with his teeth. Mustang, meanwhile, set about busily insulating himself against the long, brutal night.

The biscuits didn't last very long, and they weren't even enough to put a damper on his hunger, anyway. Now, with the hard bread sitting like a lump in his stomach, he deigned to look over at Roy in the opposite bed, already buried beneath his blanket, back to the flickering light of Edward's lantern. His chest lacked the even rhythm of sleep though – indeed, it seemed to hitch with every breath he took.

"Hey."

Mustang shifted slightly, let out a gruff, "What?"

"Thanks."

Mustang, much to Ed's surprise, turned to face him suddenly, eyes half open and lips turned gently downward. "You screwed up, kid."

"Yeah."

"You seem to be doing that a lot more, lately. I'm getting rather tired of having to cover for your sorry ass." He sounded tired, resigned.

"...Yeah. I know." Roy paused, and his lips went tight. He glared resolutely at Edward, something flickering behind the blackness of his eyes.

"I want to go home, too. It's alright to say it."

It wasn't alright to say it. Edward had spent weeks determinedly _not _saying it. But _Al_ – "I'm hungry," he said instead.

"Just a few hours until breakfast. Get some sleep. You won't even know the difference."

Edward blew out the lantern, moved his notebook to the floor, and breathed a sigh into the pillow. In the dark, with the wind outside now blatantly obvious against the airy canvas of the tent, he felt the need to fill the space between them again. Edward wasn't much one for empty air, so long as there was a willing conversationalist nearby. "Are you okay?" he said without really meaning to, eyes closed against the pillow and voice muffled.

Mustang paused before he answered. "What are you talking about? I'm fine."

"You didn't sound fine today. You sounded sick."

"I'm fine." There was no pause that time.

Silence reigned again, for a time, and Mustang's breathing had almost evened to the smoothness of sleep – as smooth as it got these days, at least – before Ed spoke again. "Don't die, bastard."

Across the room, Mustang had the nerve to sleepily snort his disdain. "Like I'd die, kid. Who do you think I am?"

And Edward, being the kid that he really was, that he really wanted to be, believed him, uncharacteristically let himself trust in the wisdom of adults.

* * *

The next day when Ed woke up, things were different. His night had been strangely dreamless, dark and peaceful in a way that he hadn't slept in years. It was wonderful to know that a night could indeed go by where his precious little brother wasn't desecrated in some way, wasn't mutilated or taken from him. He had begun to think that that was the only form his sleep could take.

Ed waited patiently beneath his covers for the reveille, stomach empty and head empty and tent silent. Mustang was uncommonly quiet across from him. When the reveille didn't sound for what seemed like hours, Edward began to suspect something was amiss in the world outside his canvas haven.

He pulled back the covers from his face, let them slither off his chest and pool at his waist. Outside, the world was dark, but that wasn't unusual. There was, however, some golden hue that the light had taken that hinted at either sunrise or sunset. It had a flickering quality to it that Ed didn't like, though. He'd seen that quality of light before, and it came with

memories that he didn't much care for. He'd seen that light emanating from his house, flashing from behind his windowpanes like fritzing incandescent lamps before it had consumed them entirely –

He gasped.

He had worn his uniform to bed again, so there was no time wasted in bounding from the bed and to the flap of the tent, but his automail was cold and it groaned in protest as he fumbled with the ties that kept the flap closed. His flesh foot felt cold and bare against the ground.

They were indeed a ways from the camp, hidden among a thick clump of shrubs, foliage, and several coniferous trees – Mustang had set it up that way so as to have quiet at night, to have a peaceful place to think in the dark. And before, when Edward had been exhausted and desperate to fall into sleep despite the rowdiness of the overzealous soldiers next door, he had been grateful. But when he finally managed to part the flaps, swinging them wide in his haste, he wasn't sure whether to be thankful or nauseous.

There was very little left of the camp. From where he was standing, yards and yards away from it, the overwhelming scent of burning flesh and blood mixed with the smoke from the fire to clog his throat and tear his eyes. He took a tentative step off the bare earth of their tent's floor and onto the snowy ground, hardly breathing, hardly noticing that his flesh foot went to needles and painfully lost feeling almost immediately. The progress brought the camp into focus, and he was able to see several shadowy figures on horseback silhouetted starkly against the raging fire.

For a moment, his mind struggled to connect exactly what he was seeing. Something in the back of his head kept insisting that they had _guards _damnit, they would have _heard _if someone had instigated an attack. They were informed to raise the alarm – to consult Flame and Fullmetal immediately upon any signs of Drachman invasion. Edward had known all along that they were in an incredibly precarious position, just on the border between the newly won territory of Amestris and the newly lost territory of Drachma. That's why Fuhrer Hakuro had posted two of the state's most capable alchemists there, for God's sake. But Ed had never _been _in a war zone before, and it was hard to register the destruction before him, hard to relate it to the camp that had been thriving mere hours before.

And yet here it was, consumed by flames. Who the fuck knew where the inhabitants had gone – the heady scent of blood in the air provided a very strong hint, but –

Ed looked toward the south end of camp, where hours before, men had screamed at the indignity of having their tent filled with mud. There were no tents there now. Just twenty-foot flames that crackled and spewed and sparked, that reached outward to claim the trees surrounding their pleasant little thicket, that hissed in a strangely pleased way every time they happened upon something particularly flammable.

One of the silhouettes barked something in a foreign tongue then, and that was enough to bring Edward's attention back to the situation at hand. Strange as it may have been, it was only a matter of time before the flames licked their way to their tent, before the Drachman soldiers' concentric circles led them to stumble upon two unsuspecting and unprepared officers – damn, hadn't Mustang seen this _coming_? But no. Of course he hadn't. He was sick and tired and miserable, and it was so much harder to draw lines between those goddamn dots when they were wavering in and out of focus.

It really was a wonder Edward had slept as long as he had – the screams must have been terrible, the soldiers must have been frightened. They had at least a hundred men. One hundred men, moaning in pain, burning to death, and Edward had _slept_ through it? What were the chances of not one out of their one hundred men escaping to _warn_ them? But would they all have been smart enough to realize not to give out their officers' position? Or maybe the attack really had been so sudden that they hadn't realized they were burning to death until they woke to the smell of their own charred flesh.

Edward took a step back, away from the horrors of the war, and his foot sang out in pain. Edward took the opportunity as a welcome distraction, glanced down at his foot red and throbbing in a backdrop of snow. He had stepped on something – his footprint was bloody. It rather made him want to laugh.

Suddenly, there was another harshly barked order, and Edward knew they needed to leave – or go, go search for survivors. Or – something. He stumbled back into the tent flinging out a "_General_," in a breathless whisper. His heart throbbed painfully in his chest. When he reached Mustang's side, he shook him none too gently, and all that Ed was able to see was his hair, thick and greasy and unkempt, scraping listlessly against the pillow.

"Mustang!" He said louder, desperate now.

The Flame Alchemist did not stir.

"Fuck!" Ed sobbed, flinging the covers back. Mustang was lying on his side, pale and peaceful looking, breath coming short and way too shallow. His forehead radiated unhealthy heat when Ed reached for it, and beneath his layers of bedclothes, Ed knew he was much too thin. "Please, please, please – you told me you wouldn't _die, _bastard!"

He gave up on trying to wake Mustang and staggered blindly backward. "Bastard, please, what the hell am I supposed to do!?"

Edward's mind moved at a thousand miles and hour, stuttering occasionally over all the road blocks he faced. Outside, Ed could hear the spitting of flames stronger now, could hear the rough orders of the Drachman officials over the fiery din. Any moment now they'd stumble on their tent, find a teenaged human weapon who had no idea what he was doing and an unconscious high-ranking officer.

Proud members of the Amestris Military _they _were.

He chose to concentrate not on the fact that Mustang was profoundly unconscious and had no intention of waking, instead focusing on the fact that he, he himself, was awake, that they both were alive, and that they both needed to _not be here _if they wanted to stay that way.

Decision made, he flew across the tent to his boots, laying serenely by his cot. He stuffed one bloody foot into one and another harsh, unfeeling one into the other. He looked towards Mustang's boots, lined side by side at the foot of his bed, and stuffed his superior officer's feet in as carelessly as he had his own. Mustang just kept up his slow, shallow breathing.

"Gotta go, we gotta go," he mumbled. It was all he could think of to get the fuck out of this tent. That was his master plan – the rest could come later when they were safely hidden and shivering in the Drachman chill.

Sliding on his coat, Edward made his way over to Mustang. They both had hats, but who knew where the hell they were now. Edward knew he was going to need them later, knew he was going to regret everything he didn't take with him later, but that was later and this was now and they had to _go_. He wrapped Mustang's thin blanket around him again, almost strangely tenderly, before he roughly hoisted his torso from the bed. One of Mustang's arms flopped off the bed and hung there, dead in the air, glove-covered hand motionless. Edward leaned down and backed his broad shoulders in the waiting outstretched arm, then took hold of it with his automail arm and _lifted_.

Mustang raised off the bed but it wasn't long before Ed lost his hold and he fell back, half on and half off the cot.

He tried again.

This time, he grabbed both Mustang's arms from behind and dragged them over his shoulders, hooking them under his chin, and again, lifted with all his might. The bastard was just too damn _heavy_ – Edward was filled with adrenaline, stronger than anyone his age should be, and Mustang was all but emaciated, and yet it was still desperately hard. Were Edward at his best, he might have been able to do this, but he was just as thin – thinner, if his automail and metabolism had anything to say about it – and he was exhausted, too.

Nevertheless, despite everything working against him, this was going to have to do. He put one foot forward, Mustang slung on his back in some horrible imitation of a piggy-back-ride, and his superior officer's feet fell off the cot to the floor with a mighty _thunk_. Then he was dragging him the distance to the mouth of the tent, and it had never seemed quite so large as it did then, with Mustang's febrile heat soaking through the clothes on his back.

If the distance from the cot to the mouth of tent seemed epic, though, it had nothing on the great white expanse that Ed faced from his tent's opening. The wind nipped threateningly at his cheeks, and he hitched Mustang a little higher on his back.

"Shit," he breathed.

The first step was difficult, but the second step was torturous. Just as Mustang's feet hit the snow, the drag increased a thousand fold and his pace slowed dangerously. By the tenth step, Edward's thighs were straining with the weight of holding them both, and the snow was getting increasingly deep. Edward knew that he would have to stop eventually to alchemize their tracks away – their copse was thick enough that the wind wouldn't do it fast enough for him – but if he lost any momentum now, he knew he might not have the strength to pick it up again later.

By the fiftieth (yes, he was counting each and every grueling one) step, he was panting. Stopping was no longer an option but a necessity – the farther they left camp behind, the more of a chance he had of his tracks being followed. He was moving slow enough that someone would have absolutely no problem catching up to him. Gently, he backed into a nearby tree and let Mustang slide lifelessly against it. Even now, he chose to ignore the way he refused to wake, the way he was too warm and too moist and smelled horribly _ill_.

Ed turned around to face his tracks. The light from the not-so-distant fires shone into them, defining them in the shadows of the early morning. He was suddenly – torn. There might be survivors. There might be soldiers still alive and in need of help. But damnit, even back to the days where Ed had been gallivanting around the countryside and helping people, back in the days when Ed had garnered the title of "The People's Alchemist," he had always been after his own gain.

Restore a woman's vase, find a place to stay for the night.

Help a man's cat from a tree, get a tip on a suspicious neighbor.

Take out a prostitution ring, get a tidbit on the Philosopher's Stone.

Ed had lived counting on the precarious balance that his life's philosophy ensured, and generally, if there was no return exchange, there was no equivalency.

And besides the thrill that came with a bit of heroics, what did he have to gain from leaving his commanding officer, his fucking father figure since the age of twelve to rot in the snow while he saved a hundred men who could give a damn about him? Ed sucked in his lower lip.

Very, very little. Perhaps a lighter conscience, in the end, but was it worth it to him? What if there were no survivors, what if it was only charred remains and rotting corpses, what if Mustang froze or got caught while he was aimlessly whiling away his time with a sea of burning corpses?

He paused, and the snow swirled thick and harsh around him.

"Fuck it!"

He clapped his hands, ignored the uncomfortable tug on his empty stomach that listlessly reminded him _transmutations take more energy than you have to spare!_, and leaned down to wipe away their tracks.

Let the little ingrates fend for themselves.

Just as the alchemy started to fizzle out and fade away, a flickering silhouette fell on freshly-smoothed snow. Ed only had time to puzzle out what that meant before a shot rang out. Miraculously, it missed him, but it had been close enough that it had sent his messy hair, still loose from sleep, waving. It found its place somewhere behind him, and Edward was up and hovering over Mustang's motionless form before the next shot rang out.

That one found its place somewhere in his automail leg. It hurt like holy hell for a moment before the backfiring of severed nerves stopped, and he lost any feeling he might have had completely. After that shot, he wasted no time in bounding forward, compensating for the loss of movement in his automail leg with a wider stride from his right, and closing the gap between them. On his way over, he clapped once, loud and resonating in the thicket, and created a thin, deadly blade on his automail forearm. His poor glove (he would regret that later, when his automail froze with ice and started sticking) lay in tattered remains behind him.

Reaching the soldier, however, was not gratifying. Edward was fast enough that he had his blade to the soldier's throat before he'd even seen the whites of his eyes. When his automail was pressed firmly against the man's jugular, though, he was able to feel the quaking barrel of a gun against his ribs – was able to look up into deep brown watering eyes.

Ed knew very little Drachman, but he had heard enough pleas to know what _they_ sounded like.

Edward hadn't killed anyone yet. Contrary as that was, given that he was fighting in a _war_, he hadn't seen any fighting. His letter to Al, probably burning away back in the canvas of their tent, hadn't lied about that little tidbit.

He didn't want to kill anyone now. He had never wanted to kill anyone all his life – he had of course. Homunculi. But he wasn't quite sure they counted.

"Listen," he started, slow and shaky. "I don't want to hurt you. I don't want to kill you."

He was close enough to see the soldier's adam's apple bob against his blade. He pushed it in tighter against the hollow of his throat, and his own eyes were wild and nearly unrecognizable in the blade's skewed reflection.

The man cursed roughly at him in Drachman, but that same half-wild fear that Ed could see in himself reflected back in a tinge of dark, earthy brown.

"You just – can't – _say _anything," it sounded ridiculous when he said it like that.

Suddenly, against his ribs, he felt the handgun tick as the Drachman soldier cocked it. Edward twitched violently, and slitting the man's throat was as easy as one violent _jerk _forward with his automail arm.

Red bubbled from his lips and splashed morosely into Edward's hair as he fell, and the violent spray from his neck surged outward onto Edward's heavy brown coat. He scrambled backward when the man's dead weight fell against him, suddenly feeling violently ill. His stomach turned, he went to his knees, and in the white, white snow, so suddenly marred by horrible _red_, he vomited.

* * *

He stayed like that, crouched over his own vile puddle of puke, slowly eating away at the snow where it had fallen like acid, until a soft noise from across the clearing lured him back to reality.

"Edward."

Faint as it was, Edward recognized Mustang's voice when he heard it and practically flew across the copse to his side.

"Mustang, oh God, oh fuck, oh shit – " he murmured, hysteria making his words thick and rapid.

Mustang breathed for a moment, shallow and soft, before replying. His hand was pressed hard and firm against his abdomen, clenched almost painfully on the muscles there.

"Hey – breathe for a second. Are you okay, kid?"

Edward wiped frantically at the tears in his eyes, the blood on his face, and meant to respond whole-heartedly with a valiant "Yes." But instead, his voice crumbled, and all that came out was, "I killed him."

Mustang closed his eyes, and his eyelashes were strangely stark against the whiteness of his cheek. "Good thing you did," he said, smiling darkly.

"What? How can you – how can you say that?"

"Because I can see a – ah – field-dressing kit on his belt. We're going to need that."

Ed's eyebrow's furrowed. "I'm not –"

But then, with a sickening wet sound, Mustang lifted his hand from his gut. It came away red and glistening in the half-light. "I'm – afraid I am," he tried to smirk, but it just looked painful.

Edward swore harshly under his breath.

"He shot you!?"

"He shot me."

"You told me you wouldn't die! You looked half-dead _before_ he fucking _shot_ you – "

"Not t-to worry," he said cheerfully, even though the stutter sounded horribly out of place in Mustang's voice. "It went right through."

High and strangled, Ed replied, "As if that makes it any better!" He ran a nervous hand through his hair. It came away bloody.

"Listen, Ed, I need you to get that kit off his belt. I don't have the strength or concentration to cauterize this myself." Ed eyed the corpse reluctantly. Blood was still leaking lazily out of the hole Ed had made in his throat.

A few seconds later, Mustang chimed in again. "Ed," he said, voice surprisingly soft. "As much as I don't want to rush you – "

"I'm fine!"

"Well. I'm glad one of us is. However – "

Edward turned back to balk at Mustang's _gall _even as they were lying, wounded and pathetic, feet away from a dead man. A dead man that Edward had just _killed_ –

"...Time _is_ of the essence, Edward," Mustang said, and there was pain in his voice this time.

"Right."

Edward knew, logically, that time _was _indeed of the essence, but facing the man he had just killed was more than a little off-putting. Ed climbed to his feet and took a hesitant step forward.

"It's freezing out," Mustang said nonchalantly, totally out of the blue. "At least the last time I was fighting a war, we were warm. Perhaps maybe a little too warm – "

And there was that comfort again. All Mustang had to do was open his fucking mouth and Ed was somewhere familiar again, somewhere comfortable and warm. His voice faded to a soothing drone as Edward inched toward the corpse, then slowly, quietly, leaned down to grasp at his belt. He stopped in a mid-crouch, having made the mistake of looking up into the man's face, still frozen in a painful grimace, eyes wide and staring.

Ed fell back on his ass from the very sight of it, mind going blank. It was moments before he even comprehended that Mustang was still talking behind his back.

"– and I remember when you were thirteen, and you ran into that General in the mess with your tray. He came to me with gravy all up his front, shouting about how you were insisting that _he _buy you a new lunch." Edward laughed softly despite himself (nevermind that it was laced with hysteria), looked away from the man's gaping maw of a throat, reached down, and carefully unhooked the bloody first aid kit.

"There's a good boy, Ed," Mustang said gently, and Ed might have cared that he sounded rather like he was talking to a dog had the situation been different. As things were, he just clung to the praise until he was far enough away from the corpse that he couldn't smell the blood.

"Right, good boy – now don't be alarmed or anything Ed, but you need to stop the bleeding from my other side, or I think I'll go into shock," his breath was short, his voice high and breathy, like he wasn't getting enough air. Ed clutched the field kit tightly.

"What – what do I do?"

"Just go around to my back, apply pressure or something." Ed moved forward, tentatively. "Try to hurry, please." Mustang's face was so, so _pale_ –

"Right, sorry."

Ed crawled around to Mustang's back, moving faster now. Mustang was already tearing off his coat and thin blanket, lifting his military jacket for easier access. Ed could easily see the exit wound through the jacket and all the blood that had soaked through. He lifted the coat with his automail hand and hissed through his teeth when he finally got a good look at it.

Just a tiny hole, far to the left side of the General's back and low enough that it might have just grazed his jutting hipbone. It was absolutely gushing with blood, a small river of it running down to pool at the waist of Mustang's pants. "Shit, Mustang."

Around front, Mustang had lifted his side of the shirt, and he echoed Ed's sentiments almost precisely_. _"Ed, is there any possibility of going back to camp?"

Oh fuck, he didn't know, did he?

"General they're – they're," he swallowed. "The Drachmans invaded. It's. On fire, Mustang." The General was quiet for a second. He closed his eyes and leaned back against the tree, blood gushing from his open wound more fiercely at the movement. If Edward thought his breathing had been bad back at camp, it sounded positively ghastly then – short, shallow, and wet. Just moving back against the tree had left him absolutely winded.

"Survivors?" he managed to say.

"I...wouldn't bet on it."

"Fuck," he whispered. "God-fucking-damn."

Mustang just kept on leaning, and Ed, unable to reach the wound with him up against the tree, made a plaintive little panicked noise high in his throat.

"Don't worry, Fullmetal. If I didn't think you'd die without me, I'd say to just leave it. As it is though – " Mustang grunted as, abruptly, he leaned forward, wordlessly granting Ed access. Edward frantically tore open the field dressing kit with his teeth and found medical gauze and tape and bandages.

"Damn, this stuff looks about a hundred years old," the General said. And it did. In fact, the bandages looked as if they'd been used before. They were heavy and stiff with dried blood. It looked as if someone had attempted to wash them out for reuse, but hadn't washed them out very well. "We'll have to make do, because I'm losing too much blood."

"I can't bandage you with these – you'll get infected!"

"Please, Ed."

And Ed couldn't ignore the pleading in that tone, so he did. Bandages, at least, he was familiar with. He'd been wounded enough times to know where to tape and how to best staunch the flow of blood. Mind, he wasn't especially familiar with gunshot wounds – every time he'd been shot, it had been serious enough to merit some sort of hospital visit, and his brother had him on his back before he could make any sort of stopgap, but flesh wounds he was familiar with, and he treated the tiny little holes like that.

The gauze, which he applied directly to the wounds, was thankfully cleaner than the bandages that he used to finish everything off. But still – it wasn't a safe combination. And if Mustang got infected out here on top of everything else, he _would _die. He should have been dead already, actually, if his breathing was any indication.

Regardless of all logic, though, when Edward taped off the last bit of the bandage and patted it gently to say as much, Mustang rose to his feet. Edward just stared, wide-eyed, at the pool of red that he had left behind. How well it matched the pool of red across the thicket –

"Are you coming?"

Was he coming? Was he –

"How – ?"

"Do you intend to just sit here, Fullmetal?" For a moment, Edward was back in the office, and Mustang was calm and collected behind his desk. That particular illusion, however, shattered like the flute of a crystal wine glass clutched too tight in his right hand, when he saw

Mustang's knees shaking violently, his hands practically spasming as they clutched fruitlessly at his discarded coat and blanket.

"No. No, I'll help," he said, and scrambled to his feet. Astonishingly, though, the world seemed to tip sideways, and Edward went straight down. Back in the snow, he wondered vaguely how he got there. Edward laughed hoarsely from his white vantage point, and it sounded absolutely ghastly, even to him. Above him, Mustang seemed only vaguely alarmed, but didn't move to help him. Indeed, he didn't seem to be able to move at all. He just glanced drily over his shoulder, legs still quivering like a newborn fawn's, and said, utterly matter-of-fact –

"I think I'm going to be sick." And he was. Just meters away from where Ed's own puddle of vomit was freezing. He hacked so hard that Edward, still just lying in the snow like he hadn't the will to get up again, couldn't help but think of that gunshot wound, of the makeshift bandages blossoming with blood. Mustang eyed the puddle almost speculatively for a moment after he'd finished. The force of his sickness had sent him back into the snow again, and for a moment, they both just sat beside one another, cold and miserable and tired. Edward was alarmed to see tears in his General's eyes when he looked up, though Mustang was quick to wipe them away. Ed knew very well that the very power of nausea did that to a person, and he could remember that every stomach flu from his childhood had been accompanied by an unexplainable bout of crying into his mother's arms.

"Motherfucker shot me in the leg," Ed said, finally, by way of explanation.

"Automail, I hope," Mustang said. His voice shook – a low, warbling, guttural sound.

"Luckily."

There was a pause, and then, "Motherfucker shot me in the gut."

Edward chuckled glumly despite himself. He couldn't not – it was just too unusual, too out of place, too fucking weird. The whole situation was.

"Are we gonna die?" Edward mumbled, suddenly very aware of the cold seeping into his coat.

"Hopefully not. We'd stand a better chance if we stood up, mind."

"'Dun wanna stand up."

"I don't particularly want to either."

"They'll find us if we stay here."

"Yes, you didn't make it very far, did you?"

"You're fucking heavy, bastard. Go on a diet and then we'll see how well I can lug your ass around."

Mustang scrutinized his vomit for a second longer before joking half-heartedly, "I imagine I'm a little lighter now if you want to give it another go."

Then Mustang was up again, and Ed marveled at it from his place on the ground. He leaned against the tree he'd been seated against a moment ago to hack a cough into the bark, then finally reached down to take the discarded coat up again. "Right. You're going to have to help yourself up, because I'm not even sure how I'm standing right now."

Edward gained his feet using the same tree Mustang had, and his automail knee rattled like a loose windowpane.

"Something's loose in there." He said, brows furrowed.

"Can you walk?"

Ed nodded tentatively, then took a halting step forward. His leg held miraculously, though it wasn't a leg so much as it was a crutch, anymore. Then Mustang took a step forward, and it was just as faltering as Ed's had been.

"Damn, we're pathetic," Ed joked halfheartedly. "We look like zombies."

Mustang quirked an eyebrow at him. "Zombie. You know. From the comics. 'Brains' and all that?" Mustang quirked the other eyebrow at him. "...Bad time, I guess."

* * *

**Again -- criticism, comments, suggestions would be utter love if you'd like to see a second bit to this story.**


	2. Search and Destroy

Wow. So. A whole year later, and here I am. I bet you guys though I wasn't coming back. Well HA. Proved you wrong! I just had a generally shitty freshman year of college, but now it is summer and things are better, and you guys can definitely expect this story to be finished by the time school rolls around in the fall.

Still for Sevlow, even though this story is heading progressively into the hurt!Ed end of the spectrum (I have problems, I am willing to admit this).

A special thanks goes to Ketita (Tramontana Keeper) who did a lot of incredibly helpful hand-holding, and definitely a special thanks goes to all of the fantastic reviews I got for the first chapter! The encouragement on chapter one was absolutely unbelievable, and that support is a big part of why I'm back here today with chapter two. Keep it up, guys. ;D

**Warnings: **Still warfic, still situations that may or may not make logical sense, still gore, still language. I apologize for any errors you may find, but right now, I really just wanted to get this bit the hell off my hard drive. I feel like it's weighing me down because I've been working on it so long, and it just needs to get off my chest so I can start fresh.

**Enjoy!**

* * *

They continued their halting progress forward, Ed with his shuffling and ineffective crutch-step and Roy with steps so short and shallow he might as well have been standing still. They'd made it approximately three feet when Roy suddenly declared, "Right. This isn't going to work." And Ed could tell quite clearly from his face that it wasn't. The unearthly, almost ethereal pallor, highlighted by unhealthy, pink-tinged cheeks, the garish red swell of his lips against the paleness of his face, the horrible, shallow, rasping breaths that made it sound as if he was choking on sandpaper. And if things weren't bad enough, they'd only just inched their way to the final resting place of the fallen Drachman soldier.

"Right," Ed agreed, and his breath made a billowing cloud before him. "This isn't going to work." But what was there to do now? All Ed knew was going forward – generally he trusted his old adage about two good legs and getting up to use them… But. But. But what were you meant to do when you _didn't_? Roy panted somewhere to his left as Ed's vision fuzzed black with horrified recognition, and he didn't know what to do at _all._

Ed looked up from his preoccupied state of panic just in time to see Mustang swaying dangerously next to him. "Sit down then, if we're not going anywhere. I don't know what we mean to do going back to camp anyway –" Ed leaned as far as he could without falling over, enough that he was able to touch Mustang's shoulder, cold with wet and trembling. He looked up then, black soulful eyes that Ed wasn't sure he recognized and said, "They're all gone? You're – they're all dead?"

And of course he was thinking about that, eating himself up about his troops with a bullethole in his gut and lungs full of debilitating fluid. As their commanding officer, everything that happened to the men under him was immediately _his_ fault. Nevermind he had been sick and weak and…and what? Slipping into a coma? _Dying?_ -- when the attack had taken place. Nevermind that there really was nothing he could have rightly done in the face of the overwhelming odds in the state he was in if their own unit couldn't have organized themselves enough to defend themselves. Mustang took things upon himself just like Ed did. They were similar in a way that Ed had never really realized until now, because they both just _loved_ too damn much.

However, Ed thought as he tightened his hand ever-so-slightly on Mustang's quivering-taut shoulder, Mustang's caring had always been on a much grander scale than Ed's. Mustang looked out for the state of his country, and thus aspired to be the Fuhrer. Mustang looked out for the good of his unit obsessively, spiraling pitifully if so much as one of them fell out of place due to something he believed to be his fault. But Ed had a narrow window of love. He loved so fucking intensely, to such insane degrees, that his pores leaked with it, that he closed his eyes and it was all he saw, that at night he dreamed and woke with nightmares of it, and in the day it pulled at his smile. But he couldn't handle that sort of intensity on such a grand scale, he couldn't, he would just explode with it. And it was probably his downfall. Al had blinded him for the longest time, he knew, even though his little brother's plight had been occasionally interrupted with the short-lived burden of someone else – and now with his little brother gone and safe and blessedly human, Ed knew he was meant to be lamenting the loss of their unit with Mustang, but all he could bring himself to see was Mustang himself.

The hubris of Edward Elric, his tombstone would read, after this whole fiasco was over and they were both dead, was that he loved too fucking _much. _Ed really ought to work on that. But – but right now –

Ed looked over, and Mustang fell. In one glorious, gentle arc, Mustang fell. Ed's heart stuttered in his chest, and Ed was horrible, Ed was a heartless bastard, but the memory of a decimated camp and the imagined visions of a hundred soldiers burning struck less fear into his heart than just the gentle _thud_ Mustang made when he fell into the snow.

"For fuck's –"

"Lil' lightheaded s'all," he heard faintly from the snow at his feet.

"No, Mustang. Goddamnit –" He dropped carefully next to him, hand resting gently at the base of his spine. There was still a blanket over his back, but Ed imagined he could feel the febrile heat soaking its way through, could imagine it was intense enough to melt through the snow beneath them. "Don't go to sleep. Please. You almost – you almost didn't wake up this morning."

"M'not tired," he breathed, his speech heavy and slurred and catching horribly at every audible wheeze. "Lil' lightheaded."

Ed briefly entertained the thought that had been a prevalent source of irony earlier in his life and that, apparently, would continue to haunt him now:

_Look on the bright side, Edward. It couldn't get much worse than this, now could it?_

And as voices suddenly rose up with alarmed shouts a mere few feet away, from the direction of the camp, thick with Drachman dialect, Ed was once again reminded of the painful truth. Even after your father has left you, your mother can still die. Even after you've lost half your family, there is always more to lose. Even when you're at your most desperate, you'll always find that there's another level of desperation lurking right behind that, waiting for that thought, that wall of weakness in the form of ignorant optimism –

_It couldn't get much worse._

Three Drachman men in heavy boots and thick woolen coats hefted guns in his face, and yes. It very much could.

Running on pure reflex and adrenaline, perhaps the knowledge of Mustang's prone form still prostrate and feverish beneath his fingers, Ed slammed his hands together. But hefting the automail was miserable, he felt so weak, and it was as if it was heavier with the weight of the knowledge that it had killed, resistant to soak itself with blood again. And Ed didn't imagine he was very intimidating then, his arm drooping, his eyes searching fervently for any measure of humility in the men over them.

One man stepped forward, face covered in a long and horrible beard, dyed yellow near the corners of his lips. He said something then, and Ed had spoken some Drachman before – he could vaguely recall bickering with Al on a street corner with a translating guide in one hand and a wad of unfamiliar currency in the other, but his arm was heavy and Mustang was dying and he didn't know what to do with the hands still poised in front of him, and when the Drachman soldier spoke he just slowly, slowly, eyes unwavering, shook his head. The man had the nerve to – smile. And that horrible yellow smile creaked up at the corners. His lips cracked with the cold and his smile was full of holes, dyed yellow to match his beard. As he turned to address his comrades again, back to Ed as if dismissing him as a threat, Ed saw him lick a fleck of red from his lip.

Ed was unnecessarily and illogically outraged at being outright dismissed. The dead body just across the clearing was his doing, goddamnit, did they even know who he was? He was the fucking Fullmetal Alchemist, Major of the Amestrian army. He could perform alchemy other people could only dream of, he could pull miracles out of his ass, he could bend the elements to his will.

The yellow-bearded man jerked a thumb at him and the two other soldiers _laughed. _More irrational anger bubbled up inside him and he glared at the arm that had, sometime during the mental tirade, fallen limp at his side. He would show them, he would, he would.

He smacked his hands together again so hard the metal compressed upon impact and groaned with pressure in the cold under his flesh palm. He could see what he wanted to make very clearly, a giant palm; he liked hands made of Earth, they bent to his will so easily and made him feel fucking godlike. He'd read some of the shitty holy books before, with all the deities making the universe, and what was more fucking iconic than a massive hand that could create and destroy as he –_He – _pleased?

But his arm was still heavy with remembered blood. He could almost feel it seeping from the joint at the elbow as the soldiers eyed him bemusedly, eyes sparking with barely restrained humor, from a few paces away. They didn't know what he was capable of when he was defending someone he _loved_.

A hand. He smashed his own hands together more firmly, willed a hand from the deepest recesses of his mind's eye. That way he could just capture them, of course. It would startle them enough that those guns in their hands would fall, that they would be able to watch him and Mustang escape to safety as they cursed their unfortunate underestimation.

It took him a full five seconds to know what he was going to do, precisely, down to the last crushing little crevices in the hand's surface – more Godlike, more realistic, more intimidating to any man who believed – but then, unbidden, another image rose to his mind.

It was the sort of thing he could always see when he sought to do alchemy that was meant to have more of an impact than a simple state or phase change. Inevitably, with the creation of something bigger, more powerful came a picture of death. Now, there was the nameless Drachman soldier's blood, gushing out of his mouth, out of his lungs, down the front of Ed's shirt. Now, there was another image, of one single digit on his hand tightening just beyond the degree it was meant for, and maybe breaking a spine, puncturing through one of the men just looking at him curiously now until their blood ran free and red down the earthen sides just as their comrade's had.

He had the power to _kill all three of them_ if he so much as placed his hands on the ground, and just the thought of it had him retreating to sanctuary of his slim little armblade. The alchemy in his mind changed abruptly, and all he could see was everyone he loved in the clutches of that hand, Al's eyes blank and unseeing from between that massive forefinger and thumb as it threatened to squeeze so hard it burst his _skull_.

With a sudden whimper he forced his hands apart, shook his head fervently, hated himself for not being able to do this even in the face of _everything_ and even over Mustang's _shuddering, dying_ body that should have meant more to him than this man with the yellow teeth whose head he could pop like a balloon. The men seemed further amused by his unease, and yellow-tooth cracked a smile so big Ed could see three holes where molars should be.

Alchemy was not an option, but his blade – he could almost see it glisten against the blue of Mustang's sluggishly rising back, a beacon of defense in the hopeless blackness of disease, and Ed would always, always have _that_.

Wouldn't he?

But – alchemy had made the arm that had killed that man across the clearing. He blinked, long and slow. His alchemy had already killed someone today, oh shit –

And if he used alchemy to kill someone, how could he honestly say he was any better than Tucker? Than Psiren? He bitched and moaned because every criminal he met was hellbent on telling him they were no different, how Ed would do the same in the same situation wouldn't he…?

Tucker in this situation. What would he do?

Ed's mind's eye created a picture of the three Drachman soldier's, heaped together in a steaming pile of wriggling arms and legs, still alive but moaning and in pain as Tucker loomed over them and just smiled. Ed could never imagine himself being that, but killing these soldiers was just a step on the road to hell and Edward would _not be that man._

After the fact, he wouldn't remember getting up. He just remembered the thoughts leading up to it – no alchemy, no blade, he would _whale on them until they let him go. _In hindsight it was rash and stupid, he would insist that the cold and wet, seeping into his body and leeching the logic from it, had been a part of it. But he imagined it was just more of the same rage that had lead him to attack so many people with just bare fists and snarling, primitive canines. Removed from his tools, lowered to his basest, he could only just remember being midstride on his way toward them, moving faster than he had thought his broken automail could carry him, when one of the soldiers cocked his gun and shot a bullet right over his shoulder.

Ed's heart did stop beating for a moment when it whizzed past his face, close enough that his hair waved crazily when he turned his head to follow it. He didn't have enough time to even finish the thought – _it was Mustang, they've killed Mustang and you're going to have to tell everyone you failed because you're a coward _– but the missed beat of his heart spoke volumes to the blood running in his veins, and it just froze in the split second before the bullet hit the ground and sent up a spray of snow next to Mustang's head.

His breath came out in a ragged cloud to match Mustang's catching moan on the ground, and Ed said, "You bastard," like an afterthought when a gun jabbed between his ribs for the second time that day.

The Drachman soldier breathed words that he couldn't understand into his ear from behind, and Ed could smell the drink in the white cloud that wafted from him. Ed just kept his eyes firmly on Mustang as the shallow mockery of sweet-nothings caressed the shell of his ear and the remnants of vodka – that was all – stung at his eyes. He didn't understand. He didn't understand. Mustang shifted on the ground enough to turn his buried head toward the crater that the bullet had created in the ground and sigh in a way that Ed would've called _resigned _in anyone else. But Mustang didn't resign himself to anything.  
Suddenly, there were words Ed could understand from the prone form on the ground. The Drachman man was still polluting the air by his ear, but Ed found it so much harder to care with his commander's dulcet baritones there now.

"He says he'll shoot me if you don't cooperate, Ed." The gun point in his back, the one that kept him pinned in place, seemed to dig in deeper at that. "He also says he'll shoot you."

"How – reassuring."

"I can't attack them, Ed. Now would be a wonderful time to pull one of those miracles out of your ass."

Ed breathed hard at that – Roy was expecting him to do something; Roy wanted him to do this. Of course he did, if it meant saving them both. The mutually exclusive bits of his mind, hovering on opposite corners of his consciousness, one regarding pleasing Roy and the other regarding the morals he held so tight and close to his chest, suddenly stood off against one another, snarling in opposite corners. Teeth bared, fangs gnashing, and Ed couldn't possibly give up one for the other, could he?

He whimpered, and the fog issued forth in steady, hazy puffs.

Then, from nowhere, a light in all the darkness. "No. We'll let them take us."

What he had said must have been particularly insane, because Mustang actually engaged in the effort of straining his neck to look at Ed, then.

"Isn't that," he said, white-washed against the snow and cautiously intrepid in the face of Ed's madness, "what we've been trying to avoid? You know. Since they killed all our men and…shot me?"

Ed licked his lips before he went on, as if saying that would make the words come out easier. "Yes, but we've been looking at it all wrong see, they must know we're important since they haven't killed us yet…but they must not know what we can do. Because…they haven't _killed_ us yet." Mustang slanted his brow.

"Don't you g-get it? If they take us into custody, they'll help you get better and then once we actually can escape, it'll be as easy as –" _a clap of his hands and they were all dead _"—a snap of your fingers."

Mustang rolled a bit to look at him, dubious. The Drachman spoke something, more rapidly than before, and that was all the warning Ed got before a gun went off again. It startled him enough that he froze when the bang issued from the barrel, and he couldn't keep still in the face of the idea that _oh god Mustang was dead, he wouldn't shoot and miss twice, he wouldn't—_

But when he whipped around to face the man, anger making him unafraid, he saw that it hadn't been the man with the gun in his back at all. It had been one from the group behind the alpha male so hellbent on intimidating him, and he was looking down the barrel of his gun as if puzzled. The man behind him looked back with Edward, gun not wavering, and howled out a huge guffawing laugh at the sight. It wasn't long until all the men joined him.

Ed absolutely – balked. They were all fucking _drunk._ Ed turned back to give Mustang the same conspiratorial look. These men must have been told to take hostages, but they really did have absolutely no idea what they were dealing with. Who in their right mind took on Fullmetal and Flame drunk off their asses anyway?

On the ground, Mustang breathed out a sighing breath of a laugh, still so tired but Ed just couldn't say resigned. "We let them take us."

It was a grandiose affair getting Mustang on his feet again, requiring more shoving of guns in both of their faces. He was absolutely exhausted and Mustang was mostly dead, it was probably only the bullet hole marring the ground, stark and morose splay of soil like blood, that kept them moving between the two buffering layers of drunken buffoons as fast as they did. They intended to go with them, it made it easier to accept being pushed around when it was by their own volition, but the fact still remained that those were real guns, and these were real drunken bastards, and if they didn't walk at just the right speed, either one of them could get their brains blown.

As Edward staggered ahead, bearing as much of Mustang's weight for him as he could without outright carrying him on his back, he couldn't help thinking about what a tight, thin, brittle rope he had put them both on just to avoid killing a few brainless thugs. He wanted to believe that throwing himself behind enemy lines was a good plan because honestly, how far could he get with Mustang like this? But he knew it was selfish, he was always selfish, everything he ever did was to save himself from his own over-critical sense of self-loathing. Wasn't that why he'd restored his younger brother? To quell those feelings that were something like nausea – the ones that always had a way of creeping up the back of his throat, polluting his ears and eyes with a miasma of toxins that he could only dissolve with a reversal of the whole guilty affair. He was so, so selfish to put himself and a man that he cared for more than he liked to think about in a situation where any number of things could conspire horribly against them to take them down, just so that he could save his soul from himself.

He found himself looking over at Mustang then, who probably didn't even realize what kind of danger Edward was leading him into half-dead as he was. He trusted Ed as blindly now as Alphonse had trusted him just before he'd dragged them both to hell. As if to punctuate the fact, Mustang clenched tighter at Ed from where his arm was grasping for support, smiled warmly down with lips dyed rust with drying blood. His eyes said he was proud of Ed and a thousand beetles crept against the ever-flowing current of Ed's blood. Behind the pride and utter, unprecedented dependence was a sort of fever-madness that Ed knew was driving this. Mustang was not in his right mind. If he were, he would have stopped Ed's nonsense plans ages ago.

But Ed tightened his hold protectively on Mustang too, though he was sure his eyes said nothing of pride in turn. Self-loathing filled him, pushing its fingers out of his mouth and greedily stealing the air before it ever hit his throat. He didn't know what to do, didn't know what to do, didn't know what to do.

Mustang opened his mouth, and there was fresh blood coating his teeth. Was it coming from his lungs? Had they finally torn themselves to pieces in the midst of all of the manic coughing that Mustang did during the day with all of his spastic efforts to tear his own body apart? Was it the bullet wound? Would Mustang live through the night, or was Ed just killing someone else he loved?

"Thank you," he said, very quiet. "For being my crutch."

Edward laughed – how else could he respond to something so absurd, really? "S'not much else I can do, is there? How are you feeling?"

Mustang's eyes blazed, and Edward knew that every bone in his body was _screaming_ behind that strange, incomprehensible gaze. "I." A sharp breath. "Have been better."

They walked like that for an hour at least. Edward knew because he could feel each minute pulling hard at his automail leg. It stung and ripped and maybe bled with the cold. Nothing new, it had done it before. He heard Mustang's breaths getting more and more wet, and he knew that as the time wore on he stumbled just that much more. Every time he fell, Edward expected a gunshot, he expected to look over and see Mustang's head somewhere on the ground in front of them, the warmth that Ed was depending on now to keep himself going leaking steadily onto his shoulder. But there was just yelling, maybe some scuffling if one of the men got caught up in Mustang's legs as he tumbled and then a minute longer than Ed had ever known any minute could last as Mustang slowly, slowly, slowly gained his feet again.

By the end of the hour, when the stumbles happened every few minutes, the tension had mounted enough that Ed could feel it buzzing around him. He drove himself half-mad with the idea that Mustang might not be able to pick himself up this time, what was Ed thinking, now they were going to shoot him where he lay like a wounded animal that had expended its worth. True to this form, Ed clung to him with animal dependence and pleaded –

"For god's sake – get up, get up, you're fine, just a little bit more, just a bit – I've got you. I've got you. _Please,_ one leg, then the other, good, good, you're fine—"

He didn't even know what he was saying anymore. He supposed nothing really had changed. He'd never known what he was saying his entire childhood. He usually only noticed the consequences after he'd said it.

When they got to camp the pace had decreased enough that the drunks were starting to notice it. They were also starting to sober enough to complain and brandish their guns just that much more menacingly. Ed could have cried at the sight of so many enemies congregated in one place, at the piles of artillery that would have made Ed blanch in fear and move in the _opposite_ direction under any other circumstances. But as it was, Ed could have dropped to the ground and kissed it if there hadn't been the general, leaning like a blushing virgin leaned on her elbows to beat her eyelashes at a pretty boy, heavy with dumb love. He breathed copper into Edward's ear frantically, he squeezed with knuckles so devoid of blood they were slightly purple. At the sight of the camp, Ed felt tremor wrack all the way through Mustang. He imagined that was something like what dying felt like.

Finally.

Finally.

Finally – what? Finally he was in the nest of the enemies that could bring him either salvation or death. What was he thinking, what was he thinking, what the fuck was he –

There was an absence of warmth at his side, and Mustang was torn from him. He frothed in his fury, he snapped like he'd been cleaved in two. It was too much, the sudden loss of the man from his side was like automail detachment. He needed that there, he needed Mustang. He provided Ed with a purpose for everything he did, much like Al had. He knew the noise that ripped from him was more animal than anything, but that was alright. At least he was being consistent.

"Sons of bitches, give him – " cold unfeeling hands replaced the tickle of Mustang's hair on his shoulder. Meaty, grasping fingers roved over the planes where comfort in its most unusual form had existed mere seconds ago. Mustang needed him, a crutch. He could hardly stand on his own.

"Mustang!"

Without even thinking, blinded by rage and unable to see, just for a moment, where Mustang had disappeared to just beyond his peripheral vision in the face of these new and uncomfortable touches, Edward clapped his hands.

His brain was alight with every alchemic circle he knew for a moment, categorizing the damage that each one would make. Which one should he use? How much exactly did he want it to burn?

His vision cleared enough to see a man before him, big and burly and standing straight with the air that only a high-ranking officer could possibly possess, when he heard a commanding voice that quite clearly wasn't Roy speaking Amestrian above all the garbled guttural Drachman voices.

"Fullmetal." It said, then more Drachman, then hands forcing his own hands apart.

In the short moment of coherence between then and oblivion, Ed had enough sense to realize that he'd just intended to kill every man here. That he'd just intended to make them all feel the pain that blazed through his own veins at the thought of having Roy ripped from him.

It was the least comforting thought in the world, and he hated himself with unabashed abandon as he was hit over the head and cast roughly into unconsciousness.

* * *

Ed woke cold and alone and afraid to the sound of screaming and guns and explosions. He didn't open his eyes immediately and he wasn't sure he wanted to anyway. The world behind his eyelids was dark enough that there couldn't possibly be any sun outside, whether the trees were keeping it from filtering to them or whether it was just the dark, dank coldness of night. He took a moment to gather himself, assess where he was and what was happening to his body. His automail was remarkably still intact, he could feel the feedback from his arm and leg more than he could see it, and he took a moment to wonder at the stupidity of these Drachman soldiers. He could escape them, he could escape them any time he wanted if only his damn head would stop pounding –

He opened his eyes and knew he'd been concussed. The world was topsy-turvy, swaying and looping and upside-down. He'd been hit in the head many times, but this wasn't like anything that had ever happened before. He'd never been hit so hard the vertigo lingered like this, never so hard blows caused the nightmare world to weasel its way out of his dreams and become real. His arms were free and he tried to work them under him. He threw his head around like a horse trying to dispel its own blinders. Every time he moved though, the ground shifted, the colors melded together. He didn't know what to do, he didn't have his alchemy, he didn't know where he was, and he was _scared._

Pathetically enough, "General!" was the first thing out of his mouth, wounded and frantic as his eyes shifted and the pain in his head flared and overwhelmed his senses. He could see smells, and the ground rippled with footsteps outside.

"General," he said again. There was nothing. There was no one. Wherever he was, cold, concussed and confused, he was alone. He closed his eyes again, because seeing wasn't worth it. His thoughts were just as manic, snowballing against one another and building something enormously dangerous.

Ed knew with a cold logical certainty that they had killed Roy. Of course they had killed Roy. How could he be stupid enough to think that they wouldn't? Such a high-ranking officer, of course they'd want him out of the way. Edward didn't know what he'd thought, what he'd stupidly assumed outside before. Let them capture us? Let them capture us indeed, Roy had to be dead now because of him. Why would they invest time and money in curing an enemy soldier?

Ed could feel his insides squirming, and he curled into himself as best he could. His esophagus was clogged with the gnarled trunk of a tree that had taken root somewhere in his heart, and every time his went to breathe the leaves rustled in his mouth and his throat contracted madly against that unmovable force in a frantic, useless effort. The trunk groaned in the face of his heaving gulps, which explained the moans that ripped themselves from him then, pained and desperate.

He'd killed Roy. He didn't know why he was so ashamed of death now, not when he'd thought of killing so many countless men just before he'd been concussed out of his wits and half-mad with fear. He'd killed Roy and he was the worst man there was.

Just then there was a trace of a touch on his back. Something soft on the flat plane of it, feather-light through the coat that miraculously hadn't been ripped from him. Not alone, then.

He opened his eyes, but the world still swayed sickly, so he moaned again, and the petting became heavier. He didn't like the disembodied touches if only because he didn't like to imagine where they could be coming from. Who else was in this camp but Roy and a few Drachman bastards? And Roy was dead.

Roy had to be dead.

_Why did Roy have to be dead?_

He whimpered, the miraculous hand learned speech and shushed him, and he slipped away again.

* * *

_"What'd they do to him?"_

_"Fuck if I know. You think he'll be okay?"_

_"Can't say. He seems – upset."_

_"Goddamnit – just a kid. Just a fuckin' kid."_

* * *

When he woke again there was light. He could see as much quite clearly through the haze of his eyelids. It was too bright against his eyes, and his head throbbed with every tangible ray. He remembered his unsuccessful attempt to regain a sitting position the last time he'd woken, and now he realized why that had been such an impossibility. His prior assessment of his bodily condition had come up short. Further inspection revealed that they'd continued beating him after he went down. He grazed fingers gently over his face, his lips. Twinges of pain flared from over-extended flesh as flakes of dried blood drifted quietly to the ground.

_Damn. _There wasn't a piece of him that didn't ache fiercely, and, opening his eyes and looking down at his body from his miserable vantage, it seemed there wasn't a piece of him that wasn't mottled by fresh blue and black bruises. He didn't attempt to get up. It wasn't that he didn't think he _could _necessarily, because he'd made his body work in more adverse conditions, but there didn't seem to be any will left in him. He didn't want to, so he didn't.

To make matters worse, hunger gnawed spitefully at his gut, a doleful ache that seemed to say that he wouldn't be moving at all until it was satisfied. Those two sad, thin biscuits seemed so far away now – almost as distant as his feeling going to bed that night, desolation coming purely from the trivial little worry of a skipped dinner, hope coming solely from the promise of breakfast on the horizon. Life now was a hard ground, a veritable galaxy of scars and bruises, a cold certainty that Mustang was dead, and thoughts of Al, hundreds of miles away and longing for his older brother. Edward yearned for that night and that dark, heavy sleep.

It was only then that he bothered to look around him. He was on the cold ground, flumped on one side like all the life had fallen from him. All he could see when he looked ahead was a watery-bright strip of canvas – the wall of a tent no doubt. Casting his eyes up, down, left, right yielded only stretches of moist, hard-packed earth. He was inside a tent somewhere in Drachman camp, cold and limp and useless as the day he was born. He might have been able to do something if he'd felt bothered enough to stretch out a hand or to clap, but vague recollection of his inane plan and a deep, shameful fear of bringing anymore pain on himself than he already had stopped him dead.

He knew he ought to turn over. He was inside a tent, up against a wall, who the hell knew what was on the other side of it? He could just be making a show for Drachman soldiers if he moved. He mulled over it for a moment before he finally decided that yes, it was worth the effort, before gathering his strength to turn. Just as he finally felt prepared, foreign voices sounded from outside the tent somewhere behind him and then there was the heavy clunking of multiple sets of boots tromping into the small space. Edward could hear their guns clicking, could smell the smell he'd come to identify as distinctly Drachman in his short time in their company. They wore fur on their heavy uniforms, so they often smelled like a wet animal, heavy and putrid. A wet animal that had rolled in vodka and gunpowder.

He wrinkled his nose and closed his eyes, willing the sour foulness away from his aching head, just as he was pulled roughly from the ground. Voices came quick and rough, too slurred for Ed, a mediocre speaker of Drachman, to even begin to understand. His feet dangled off the ground, and he felt his toes skim the earth with each swaying motion of the Drachman's meaty fist. He shied away from the hand, refused to open his eyes, and hoped against all hope that they would leave him alone for just a bit longer.

The arm shook him, the knuckles brushing across his swollen jaw and bringing a ragged hiss from the back of his throat, and Ed knew that he would have no such luck.

"Fullmetal," someone said suddenly, and it was a word that Ed knew in that voice. It was the officer from earlier, still commanding as ever, this time close enough that his warm breath gusted across Ed's face. "You are the Fullmetal one, yes?"

Ed nodded, just because he didn't really know the protocol involved in captor-captive situations, and while spitting in his face seemed like a good option, it probably was not the most viable. Who knew how many guns the other people in this room had, where he was, how he could escape if he even managed to from this one set of grasping fingers –

"Open your eyes, listen. You know why you are brought here, yes?" Ed slitted his eyes in response and the light _burned_, explosive little pops behind his eyeballs. His fingers twitched with unexpended power, and his eyes wept it from their corners like tears.

"Can't say I do," he rasped.

The man smiled a crooked smile that glinted yellow in Ed's over-taxed retinas. "You will want to get rid of that attitude."

Ed was about to ask _why the hell should I, you've robbed me of everything you asshole, I could kill you right here – _

Through his wavering vision, Ed saw the man turn his head and nod to a group of snow-covered Drachman's off to the side. They all nodded in return, exited, and returned almost immediately with a limp form covered in familiar Amestris blues, and Ed found hidden strength almost immediately. His legs wanted to walk again, his arms wanted to touch and hold and find a pulse.

"His wounds are bandaged, but he is not in clear," the words were crisp, rolling off of his tongue in such a smooth and easy accented tone that Ed wondered at it. How was it possible to speak of life and death, _this man's_ life and death, with such cold clarity? Ed squirmed and clutched fruitlessly at the fist. "You care about him. You are clearly not practiced in war, you care too much, you show too much." Images of his headstone flashed across his vision again – here lies Edward Elric, he cared far too much – and Ed barked the man in the kneecap with as much strength as his current leverage and concussion and shock allowed him to.

Ed didn't expect to be on the ground, but he found himself there quite suddenly. The General lay in an unmoving heap a few feet away, and Ed didn't even think about alchemy or the soldiers or the consequences of what he'd just done before he was scrambling unsteadily on all fours toward him. He needed to verify through touch that he was still alive; this was important, this was key.

Not considering the soldiers turned out to be a bad idea though, and he only had a split second between the moment he saw the booted foot before him and the moment it made impact with the bleeding gash on his forehead to consider that perhaps this wasn't the best stab he could have taken at captor-captive protocol.

"Yes. You see. You make too easy," he heard again, smug and satisfied and filtering through his daze. "He is alive, I assure you."

He became aware of himself and the boot poised just above his kidney pressing a steady, even, threatening pressure into his tender belly just a moment later. He dared to slit his eyes again only to find the same yellow-toothed officer hovering just beyond his reach. He twitched his arm as if to punch his smug-ass mug, that asshole, that insufferable fucker – and the boot on his gut pressed down hard. He could feel each little stitch, each imprint in his starved stomach and he gasped aloud before the CO barked a Drachman order and the boot relinquished its hold on his consciousness.

With another abrupt order, the boot moved to press hard on his human hand, and Ed wondered at that a moment before the explanation came on another putrid, steamy exhale. "Can't let you drawing circles yet."

Ed's head no longer pounded or ached with each beat of his heart but it just straight out _hurt_ like a motherfucker. He hoped there was nothing wrong with his skull, with his brain – lord only knew these fuckers wouldn't do a thing about it.

"Circles?" he managed, voice weak.

He received a kick to his ribs for that remark, pain blossoming and distracting from the swollen mess of his head as he felt something give way under the heavy sole. He tried to curl onto his side defensively, but more boots on his kidneys pinned him in place and so he just heaved hard breaths beneath them until he felt like he could properly take in air again.

The man continued, leering, "Don't play jokes, don't make dumb, we know you are alchemist. We know you are Fullmetal one. You play with elements and alloys like child toys for filthy Amestris government, and now you will do so here."

Maybe it was the concussion, maybe it was the conditions, maybe it was the fact that _someone had just fractured his fucking ribcage – _but Ed simply wasn't following. He licked his lips and tossed his head. He could just see Mustang out of the corner of his eye, but he did his best to keep from looking because he could also see a veritable sea of dark brown boots, all surrounding that tender stomach, that open wound. They could kick him as much as they wanted, so long as they didn't disturb the very tenuous balance Mustang seemed to have between life and death. "I don't understand," he said.

There was another short exchange in Drachman, and then he was hoisted again. Two sets of hands this time, and he could feel the difference in their fists holding his arms in place behind him from the head bastard, the man in charge. Mustang was lifted before his eyes with a man on each of his limbs, swinging carelessly between them like a rag doll, and the arms on his were the only thing that kept Ed from pouncing. They were so careless, and he was such a precious thing to be swinging around like that.

The men carrying Mustang walked out the canvas flap, and before it swung shut, he saw them take a sharp turn to the right. He logged that away. If Mustang was alive, continued to be alive, he was alive in that direction.

Shortly after, they walked him slowly out of the tent and into a smoky world of snow and filth. Drachman soldiers peered at him from row upon row of shoddily constructed tents, spitting on his boots as he walked past. His hair and his eyes, grimy and clouded with rusty red as they were, must have been a beacon in this dreary hellhole. So easy to spot, it might make it harder to escape if he had to make a break for it with Mustang later. Lucky for him, Mustang fit in just –

And unexpected blow cracked brutally against the stinging wound at his temple. It was one too many hits to his already pounding head, and his vision whited out for a moment. When it returned, he found himself upright solely because of the rough hands on his arms. In front of him lay a thick and heavy glass bottle steadily leaking some sort of alcohol onto the hard-packed earth and dying the snow there a dark amber. His knees were weak and wobbly and he could feel spikes of horrible pain with each beat of his pulse, but again he was forced on.

"He says you look like woman," the commanding officer put in airily from somewhere ahead of him. "Your hair. A woman's hair." Ed's hair hung loose and lank and stringy and sticky from his head, and he wondered vaguely, brain fuzzing like radio static, why this mattered at all. Hawkeye was a woman, and she was a better soldier than any of these motherfuckers.

A hail of laughter followed every step of his unsteady, bowlegged, limping gait – with all the excitement, he'd almost forgotten how very fucked his automail was – all the way into a tent that was bigger than the rest, strips of canvas hoisted high above his head and running with the colors of Drachma's flag. Behind the flaps of the doorway Ed found a jungle of rusty red bayonets, mud-clogged rifles, guns and scrap metals of all sorts clogging the entry way. On the far side of the tent was a small work table of rough particle board. The commanding officer came forward and spoke again in his rough Amestrian tongue. "Here. You do your work for Mother Drachma now."

Ed's tongue was heavy in his mouth as realization started to dawn on him. "Where's the General?"

The Drachman raised his eyebrow pointedly, disbelief wrinkling his brow. "Xingan General is alive. He will be alive so long as you recycle our metals, fix our weapons. Fullmetal."

And didn't that just fucking figure.

"Is he – well cared for? Is he alright?"

"I tire, I tire of your caring. You care too much, it is too much. You fix our weapons, he lives. That is all." He waved a hand and muttered something, and the hands on his released. Unsteady on his own, Ed stumbled forward toward a pile of scrap metal, close enough that he could see bloody stains still clinging tenaciously to some of the objects in the pile. One bayonet on top, freshly severed from its gun it seemed, shimmered with blood that hadn't yet gone to rust, and Ed felt his stomach turn within him at the sight.

Eyes still on the pile of death in front of him Ed whispered, "If he dies?"

The answer came in a quick snap, and Ed knew he'd pushed too far. "He will not."

But that didn't stop him from pushing more. "He's ill. His lungs."

"Medicines, antibiotics, he will have them while you work."

"Can I see him again?"

"Too much, it is too much, shut your mouth. Here." He stepped forward, grabbed the bloody bayonet from the top of the heap in one hand and a blown-out rifle in the other. He thrust them out to Ed, tipping his head pointedly toward the particle board work station. "I see you fix."

Ed's hands shook at his sides. He couldn't help but think that this was just more of the same, more of what he'd been so violently opposed to. He shouldn't transmute this gun back together so that it could kill more of his fellow soldiers, take countless more lives, just for the sake of one man he wanted to see make it through the night. The choice should have been easy. Between the lives of _these_ men and the lives of _his_ men, between the life of _Mustang_ and the life of his _country_ – the choice should have been clear. But Ed's moral compass was not infallible, and Ed would do anything in his power to keep the only constant adult figure he'd had in his life since the age of twelve alive. The choice should have been simple, and it was. Just not in the way it should have been.

Besides, it wasn't as if this had to last long. Just so long as Mustang was recovering. When he was well enough to escape with Ed, it would be a very simple thing to do. And why wouldn't it with two alchemists on their side?

Trembling fingers reached out for the two torn pieces, and Ed walked toward the table as he would have in a funeral procession. The grimy bayonet did very little to sully the already rust-dyed glove on his flesh hand, and if anything the blown gun in his right hand chipped away some of the lingering dried blood. When he reached the table, he set them gently on the splintery surface and solemnly lifted his hands to clap.

Fingers almost touching, a voice rang out, "Quit fooling, draw your circle." Ed – stopped. Blinked. Allowed the slow-turning cogs to work the frost and blows off before…

Was it really possible that these people weren't aware of his ability? It's true that in Amestris most people didn't know, that it was a novelty in every new town he visited, but he had assumed that that novelty was the only thing keeping him alive in the enemy's clutches. After all, any alchemist could draw a circle to make weaponry, but he had the advantage of being able to do it that much faster.

He dropped his hands to his side, looked back over, smiled grimly. He said, "You caught me," and then reached for the piece of chalk at the other end of the table. His heart pounded, the telling cracks in his ribs pulsed, and his head throbbed as he took the chalk in his hand.

If they needed him to transmute their weapons, thinking he was just a standard alchemist for Amestris, nothing special, no big deal – then it was quite possible that these people knew absolutely nothing of what alchemy was capable of. They couldn't know, could they? What a circle looked like, what properly performed alchemy looked and felt like when it saturated the air –

He started drawing. He knew all the proper elements off the top of his head, down to the last bits of iron in the blood on the surface, and it was so easy to call the images to his fingers, manifest it with the chalk in his hands. But it was also so, so easy to – slip every once in a while. The first mistake was a slight waver on the symbol for the metal, a minute little wiggle in the arc of the curve that spoke of a weakness. It sent a secret little thrill up Ed's spine to draw it, and he licked his lips and glanced around at the soldiers watching him, looking closely for any sign of recognition. There was none, they stood straight and tall at attention. All of them looked wary, as if they had only seen the effects of alchemy on the battlefield and were leery of any alchemist, no matter how much he seemed to lie under the thumb of the law. The tip of a gun in the small of his back reminded Ed quite effectively of the very real threat on his and Mustang's lives if he made this little fuck-up too blatant.

The head goon just looked smug, like he knew they had Ed cornered, like he knew Ed wouldn't take Mustang's life into risk. And he was right in that respect – Ed wouldn't. He would transmute their weapons, but this he could do, this he could. He grasped at whatever power he could have like a lifeline. It wasn't much in the great scheme of things, a wonky gun or two, but this he could do.

The second mistake was in the last symbol he drew, and by then he had begun to get bolder. It was a disruption in the flow of the material, a slightly more blatant mistake than his last. To any eye highly trained in the alchemic arts it might have even been apparent, read as more of a sabotage than an error, given that it really wasn't a mistake so much as it was a conscious decision to put a hole in the matter he should have been seeking to mend. He glanced around discreetly, sweat beading his brow, and willed his trembling fingers not to betray him when he finished the circle off with his token flourish. But the soldiers did not fire, or cock their weapons, and when no one jumped forth to stop him, no one brandished a gun or threatened Mustang's life, Ed smiled unabashedly, deliriously happy to have some degree of control back in his life. He couldn't imagine what it looked like from their point of view – captured, covered in filth and grinning liked a maniac – but it was obviously the most incriminating thing they had witnessed thus far, nevermind the paper thin weakness that would be in the barrel of the gun.

"Stop your smiles," said the commanding officer. He then wiggled his hand a bit, putting the enlisted men on what Ed could only assume was a higher alert, given that they all lifted their guns and jabbed at him a bit. Ed saw a younger soldier swallow convulsively. "What is there to be smiling about?"

Ed lifted both his hands to the edge of the circle, huffed a breath, ignored the twin aches of his head and stomach, and said, "Nothing, I just – love alchemy." Hand's tightened on guns, soldiers breathed in like it was the last breath they expected to take, fingers twitched on triggers, just waiting for the array to go ever so slightly awry and –

And then the transmutation began. It was clearly not _good_ alchemy, any novice would have recognized that the yellow light vomiting sluggishly from the lines wasn't exceptionally effective or powerful. But almost all of the enlisted men shied away almost immediately, lifting hands to shield their eyes from the mediocre light. Their attention switched from suspicious to abruptly fascinated as the gun and bayonet miraculously became one in front of them, just as they'd been bade to do.

The officer just grinned, jaundiced in the sickly yellow light and looking like the cat who had just landed the alchemically enhanced canary.

It was such a pathetic transmutation to impress him, such a far cry from what he was generally capable of, but the same sense of pleased satisfaction came to him as the transmutation died out and all that was left was the circle, silence, and an innocuously clean and complete weapon stark against the particle board. It would fire, once or twice maybe, before the weakness of the metal would give to the brutal, primal power of the bullets and it would simply crumble.

"Good," the officer said, hefting the gun. He closed one eye and pointed the muzzle in Ed's direction. "Good. Feed him, he will start work tomorrow." He lowered the gun and smiled wickedly.

"And – and the General," Ed suggested with some trepidation.

"And the General. Feed him as well."

And Ed let himself be led away from the tent, let himself be dragged and humiliated, because things would work out now – Ed would _make_ things work out now – and they would _live._

* * *

Enjoy! Reviews are much loved and much appreciated. Expect more soon.


	3. Up and at 'Em

In keeping with my ambitious once-yearly updating schedule, here is the new chapter. Originally, this was meant to be the final chapter, but I'm splitting the final chapter in half, because it's gonna be LONG. I can't really see me getting it done by the end of the year as I'm currently working on a relatively epic wangst fic (for FMA Big Bang) that should be up sometime next year. I want to have at least one update this year, damnit! Anyway, rest assured - I am still writing it. I intend to finish this fic no matter what it takes. So - thanks for sticking with me.

Thanks to Ketita/Tramontana Keeper for the hand-holding and Sevlow for the original inspiration. Three years ago. XD;

**Warnings: **Still warfic, still situations that may or may not make logical sense, still gore, still language. There's also a bit of straight-up torture here, as well as a touch of implied rape, so watch out for that.

Enjoy!

* * *

That night, Ed couldn't find any way to lie on the ground that didn't aggravate every ache and pain he had accumulated that day. The outlines of the guards were stark against the canvas of the tent, glowing and flickering with lanterns outside. His leg was a sullen dead weight pulling at his thigh, and everything, everything, everything was far too cold. The only concession they had made to his comfort was a thin thatch mat that separated him from the chill of the earth but did very little to insulate him from the horrible, strength-sapping cold of the night air.

One of the strangest things was the sound of the voices outside. He'd never really contemplated how very familiar Amestrian was or how accustomed he was to falling asleep and waking to Mustang's soothing speech, nor had he ever contemplated quite how_ ugly_ Drachman was, or quite how strange it would be to be surrounded by a language he couldn't understand. It gave him and overwhelming sense of paranoia, because they could be talking about the weather or they could be talking about how Mustang was being strangled a few tents down and Ed wouldn't ever know the difference.

Mustang.

Ed thought of Mustang, and it made him cold and alone and afraid and shameful, and he wanted so badly to curl in on himself, bring his knees to his chest and cry there, but his leg was a dead weight, his ribs didn't want to bend that way, and his head hurt so badly that he didn't think he could find the tears. He rolled onto his back, and the ceiling of the tent roiled like the sea and swelled like nausea. Maybe it was better that he couldn't sleep, because he really had one hell of a concussion. He tried to think back on all the times he'd been hit in the head that day, and decided it must be a relatively high figure because he couldn't seem to remember all of them.

On top of everything, his stomach was upset. They'd fed him some sort of thick, greasy porridge that burned all the way down and coated his throat in ash. It sat in his stomach like a rock, seemed like a solid block despite the fact that he was _almost_ sure it had gone down in separate syrupy spoonfuls. He wasn't entirely sure, because he had wolfed it down almost too quickly to taste how utterly _horrible_ it was. Honestly, he was very lucky that his gag reflex had stopped working ages ago.

He sighed, rolled over, felt uncomfortable, worrisome twinges from all over, and didn't sleep that night.

* * *

Ed vomited on his first transmutation circle. His head was not getting better. The walk to the tent where the weapons were held had been _grueling_; the light reflecting off of the snow had been too much for his over-sensitive eyes. He couldn't focus, his head hurt, his stomach churned, and eventually, it had all been too much. He fucking hated looking so pathetic in front of these bastards, but focusing on the thin lines of the transmutation circle had finally done him in.

The guards brandished their guns like it would make him magically stop hurting – neither of them knew Amestrian. It was clear they'd been given strict, specific instructions that didn't account for their dangerous charge getting sick all over their pet project. Ed leaned on one arm and tried to recover his wits, but there was nothing but white spots in his vision, and hell, for all he knew he could be bleeding from his brain.

He turned to the guards, and as slowly and loudly as his aching head would allow he said, "Doctor."

His efforts got him shoved with the butt of a gun. He wasn't sure if they expected him to go back to drawing in the puddle of his own sick, or if they were testing to see if he would just fall over when touched. If they'd been going for the latter, they got exactly what they wanted. His balance was gone, his equilibrium totally thrown, and his automail knee was still fucked anyway. It gave out, and he tipped to the left.

That, at least, seemed to get their attention. One of them mumbled something to the other and then meandered off in the direction of the tent flap. While Ed contemplated getting back on his feet using the rough, unsteady particle board table, wondering absently if it would tip and leave him covered in his own mess, the butt of a rifle appeared in his vision. Instinctively, he flinched away, covering his tender skull with an automail arm before he realized – the guard was helping him up.

Huh. It was such an out of character act of – not _kindness_, not necessarily. Conscientiousness, really. The picture that the rifle butt presented contrasted so strangely to the drunken, gun-wielding assholes from the day before that his aching head didn't quite know how to deal with it all. But that thought was cut off as the Amestrian-speaking General he'd become so familiar with strolled into the tent with an expression that said he just couldn't be fucked with Ed's nausea. The gun pulled out of his vision as the soldier saluted, and instead, the General pulled him roughly from the ground himself, tugging at Ed's many aches with strong, calloused hands.

He said, "You are more trouble than good."  
And Ed repeated, "Doctor," as the sudden change in position sent the room spinning and his stomach churning again.

The General shouted something at the two soldiers, doubtless outraged by the fact that his captives did little more than absorb their resources. He seemed to debate with himself on the merits of taking Ed to the infirmary, keeping a firm hold on Ed's arm.

"I take you, they give you medicine, and _then_ you work."

"Yes," he said quietly. "Then."

And with a powerful tug at his arm, they were off again. The two guards seemed to mull over following before they finally decided that one of them would suffice. Ed tried to pay attention to where they were and where they were going. It was important to situate himself in the camp if he ever wanted to escape from it. But everything spun and swayed sickly, and they moved so fast that Ed was having a difficult time _not_ concentrating on his footwork. By the time they got there Ed could only figure that they had gone _mostly_ left. His tent, the tent where he spent his nights on a cold thatch mat, was _mostly_ to the right.

He was just attempting to retrace his steps, trying to figure where he had entered when –

There was Mustang. On a cot in the corner of the tent. It was blessedly warm. He had a blanket, and there was a whole _pitcher _of water at his bedside. It was more than Ed ever could have asked for. He was alive, and he was warm, and he was –

"—dog will not tell me what is wrong, I will let him– " the General shook him, Mustang wavered and faded out of his vision, and Ed's knees justgave again. But this time, the General was there. He held him steady, and Ed could almost swear he also held back the bile pushing up his throat with some sheer force of will. He seemed determined to ensure that he wasn't made a fool of, which probably meant that the decision to keep two Amestrian alchemists within the camp was not a popular opinion, and was an opinion he was probably responsible for. Interesting.

He kept his eyes on the doctor now, but he couldn't stop them flickering back to Mustang. He shifted in his sleep and coughed a little, and Ed wanted so badly for him to wake up. And see him, say something, tell him to stay strong or keep forward or tell him he was doing the right thing transmuting these weapons. Oh god, Ed didn't know how he was doing this alone.

He finally answered, "My head," with a vague gesture at the tear in the skin there.

The doctor grabbed him roughly by the chin, muttered something in Drachman, and there was no warning before there was a light shining into his pupils. He hissed, felt tender and abused and tired. There was a conspicuously empty bed next to his General and he could – he wanted – if he could just have a moment back there in that tent. Comforted and protected and secure.

After a bit more prodding, the General relayed the doctor's message to him. "You are concussed."

Ed took a moment to marvel at the medical ingenuity. The doctor gave him a pill from a stash that had clearly been stolen from the med tent at their own camp, which was more of a shock to Ed's system than he ever could have imagined. Maybe that fire hadn't been all-encompassing, maybe it had spared something, maybe there was someone looking for them.

They gave him the rest of the day off. The General escorted him back to his tent, and Ed paid very close attention to the route indeed.

* * *

Ed counted seven days after that, over a week he had been in this hellhole. Day one had been wrought with more confusion and sensitive eyes – perhaps too little fudging on the part of the weapons he'd "repaired." It was a sad measure of his competency as an alchemist that he was better able to successfully fix a weapon than to unsuccessfully fix one. Day two saw more coherency. They seemed to remember he needed water at some point, and he got it when they saw fit. But even that little bit was more than enough to sustain him, power whatever mechanism in his brain spat out arrays. Days three through five saw the beginnings of normalcy creeping into this most abnormal situation. Ed felt well enough that his weapons were nearly perfectly imperfect. He found the most effective method of fudging guns, he developed alloys that looked strong but crumpled under pressure. And his effective ineffectiveness was rewarded in days six and seven, which saw the guards growing more and more secure in their positions and the General more and more smug.

They began to get complacent. The General was obviously being rewarded for the risk he'd taken, and he saw fit to treat Ed well because of that. Well. "Well" was a relative term here – his ribs hadn't suffered any more violent attacks, his head was healing over nicely, and on the seventh day, at dinner, he got bread to eat.

As Ed tried not to look too desperate inhaling it, the General said, "He recovers," like he was doing Ed some great favor. Ed hated to look pathetic, but in all honesty – he was. Ed clung to any information about Roy with greedy abandon. Usually, he had to listen closely for words he recognized in Drachman conversation as he transmuted weapon after weapon after weapon. He could hardly believe that such a succulent tidbit was being offered so freely.

"Oh. Thanks," Ed said.

"It is nothing. Tomorrow, you start more."

Ed didn't have time to think up a response before the General was gone.

Later, alone in the tent, the bread soaking up some of the hunger that had been gnawing at him since he'd toted Mustang away from the flaming ruins of their camp, he thought he felt good enough to find Roy. It was why he'd memorized the route when he'd been concussed, but he'd been too consumed by hunger and pain and exhaustion to even think about making the ten minute trek over there, avoiding guards and soldiers and doctors and dealing with his broken automail. Performing transmutations all day with very little sleep meant that he was often too tired to even consider moving, to even consider sacrificing any of the precious few hours he got to sleep.

But tonight he felt lucky. Well-rested and lucky.

It was easy enough to slip under the heavy canvas of the back of the tent. A hostage meant that they didn't really bind him, and the barricade at the border of the camp meant that they didn't feel the need to post guards all around the tent. Even if he escaped out the back and tried to flee the camp, there was really nowhere to go. But he wasn't trying to flee the camp, now.

His arms were bound together with a simple, rough rope. He didn't know what they hoped to prevent besides a good night's sleep, because he could have drawn a circle easily if he felt the need, and he probably could have slipped the knot even without alchemical augmentation. But tonight, he needed both his hands, and he needed the rope intact to prevent any suspicion, so it was a simple enough matter to clap, stretch the fibers on the rope a bit, and pull his hands free. His automail knee was going to be a problem no matter what, so he just concentrated on trying to find the right pattern of step.

And it was working until he hit the first guard, just around the front of his tent. He lost his momentum and stumbled, and his knee clattered, and the guard looked around stupidly from his post at the door. Ed had a few panicked moments of silently pleading the guard not to look inside the tent for him too soon – they usually only poked their heads in once every two hours, when the sentries shifted. Ed figured he had about an hour and forty-five minutes left if everything went according to plan. The sentry casually scratched his neck and didn't look into the empty tent, and Ed very consciously didn't sigh in relief before moving on.

He fell back into the shadow of his tent and looked over to the right, taking shelter behind a tent there. From what he'd seen, he was housed in a group of larger tents on the outskirts of the camp. Things would become easier once he moved into the confusion of the soldiers' housing. That was a sea unruly commotion, drunkenness and revelry. Everyone, including the general and his guarding soldiers at the weaponry tent, seemed in such good humor it was safe to say that the Drachmans had likely executed some sort of victory against the Amestrians in the last few days. And that was bad news for his country, but in its own way, his only very selfish way, it was fantastic news for Ed.

He skipped easily behind three more overly large tents, covered with snow and crackling with ice. His knee groaned with this cold, and he silently willed to stop as he approached a big, muddy road that he recognized. It led to the center of the camp first, and later, to the other edge of it. To the medical tent. He couldn't take it directly, but he skimmed along behind tents that ran along it easily enough.

The guard was lax, the soldiers were relaxed. Before the snow had even seeped into his boots, he had passed the tent housing all his transmutation circles and fudged weapons. It loomed large and glorious amongst the tiny troops' tents, and Ed caught himself looking at it too long before –

The tent he was hiding behind shook, and a Drachman man stumbled out. He dragged a woman out behind him, his hand tight around her upper arm, and she was like a splash of color in this dark world of furs and ice and mud Ed found himself trapped in. She had to be Amestrian. Her coloring was Amestrian, her features were delicate like an Amestrian. Her face was flushed red, her lips were wet and rimmed in dark smudges like bruises, and her blonde hair was loose in slick, sweaty rivers down the sides of her face. She was beautiful, and Ed saw his own horror mirrored in her light blue eyes.

Ed was, before anything, reminded of Winry. He was little more than a stranger to war, and he'd heard stories about men going crazy from having seen the faces of their loved ones on the battlefield. But Ed hadn't seen a battlefield, not really. He'd seen one desperate kill in an alcove with only his dying superior officer to serve witness, and there hadn't been time to mix faces, but here he was confronted with Winry – panting, bruised, battered Winry, and he lost sight of Mustang for a moment, reaching out a hand to her over the canvas tent before he even really had a chance to take her all in.

Everything then happened very quickly.

The woman, showing fire that made Edward really believe he'd made the right choice associating her with Winry, spit in the Drachman soldier's face and jerked her arm away, rushing toward Edward. There was dawning realization in her eyes, and Ed knew that he was a hero she'd seen in newspapers. Oh, hell if he needed this now.

But as she got closer, Ed noticed certain things that he hadn't taken in before, when she was hidden around the front end of the tent. Her skirt was in absolute tatters, splattered grimly with drops of blood, and hiked down on one side to reveal flashes of bare skin and bruises on the sides of her hips. She walked with a limp, and her feet had to be cold bare as they were in the sloppy, icy muck covering the ground. Every step closer to him made a morosely comical sucking noise as she struggled away from the Drachman man. He waited, face flushed in a different way, and he smelled of the same wet animal drunkenness that everyone here did.

She reached Ed and touched him reverently before throwing her arms about him like he was some kind of savior. Which was funny too in its own grim way, because she was taller than him, and her greater weight was over-balancing his fucked knee. But she whispered easy, unaccented Amestrian words in his ear, and it was a moment of unfathomable beauty before –

He felt her ripped from him and thrown to the ground. His arms were still extended to hold her, he could still feel her hair whispering against his cheek, and Ed, a country boy who had been raised bowing to women and respecting women and holding his mother upon a pedestal of greatness, couldn't really fathom how she'd ended up on the ground. How could any man abuse his strength like that against a creature like her? Ed knew a lot of kick ass ladies, but that healthy fear and knowledge that there were many women who could absolutely lay him flat, always came with the knowledge that women, especially women in distress, deserved to be treated a certain way, and this most certainly was not it.

He punched with his automail fist before the drunk fucker even knew what hit him. The Winry that wasn't Winry rose shakily even as he dropped like a stone, covered in mud now and terrified. It was strange how that anger hadn't really given him time to think, how that harsh knife blade of feeling had cut clean through his better judgment unlike a hell of a lot of other feelings had. But then, that hadn't been alchemy, it had been shattering a man's jaw. He would live, but he'd have a fucking hard time eating solid foods for a while. Bastard.

Ed turned to the woman and tried to look better than he felt, hand lightly squeezing the abused flesh on her upper arm.

"What's your name?" he said softly.

"Louisa," she said. "You're the Fullmetal Alchemist. Did you come for me?"

It was such an innocent question that it made Ed sick. Because it made him think back to the one hundred individuals Ed hadn't really given a damn about. Even now he couldn't stop his mind flashing to Mustang, what this meant for getting to Mustang, and what it would mean for Mustang if she was caught. Ed didn't come for her, no one from the Amestrian military would come for her. She was a pretty young woman with a promising future, and she was one hundred percent expendable.

So Ed said, "No." Her face fell. Ed's bleeding heard throbbed uncomfortably, caught between his usual value for human life and the callousness that war had put there. "But here, let's see if we can't help you or get you somewhere safe or something." Ed had no idea what the fuck he had just promised.

Heads were starting to pop out of tents. They hadn't yet focused on two of the most obtrusive heads in the camp, blonde in the midst of black, peeking from between tents halfway to the med bay. But it wouldn't be long before they did. Ed didn't know what to do, so Ed took off running. Louisa knew enough to follow and stay close, and she hissed in pain when her feet struck ice or rocks. Eventually, she caught up enough to take Ed's hand, and that's why Ed felt it when she dropped.

He was puzzled when her dead weight pulled him down – he'd been clamped to her just as much as she had to him. It had been such an odd moment of danger and companionship, camaraderie borne of fear behind enemy lines that he'd never really had a chance to make with his fellow soldiers. His knee gave, and he looked back to see –

Winry's face. Sightless, staring eyes and a tiny pin-prick of a hole leaking blood from her forehead. He gasped out a strangled shout, struggled to disentangle her hand from his still clamped so hard in death, and was only then able to see Winry's little nose dissolve into a slightly less shapely one, to see the blood running over freckles that Winry had never had. He was too startled, too alarmed for discretion now. That had been a practiced shot and it could have taken him out but instead it just made it clear that they wouldn't kill him. They'd catch him now, he'd made too much of a ruckus, but he needed something before they exiled him back to his tent. Fuck it all he could see the med tent and he needed to see Mustang.

Willing himself up and away from this new blemish on Ed's overtaxed conscience, tears welling up in burning bands under his eyes, Ed staggered to the toward the med tent. He wouldn't escape, he wasn't sure he'd ever intended to escape or even where he'd intended to go in the first place. But now there was just a single-minded determinedness to get to Mustang, nothing mattered if he got to fucking _Mustang –_

Three soldiers hit him before he ever made it there, and a hail of blows accompanied the sinking despair of knowing that he'd never be able to see him, now.

* * *

To Ed's surprise, though, they just led him around the front of the med tent, into the warm enclosure that smelled like infection and medicine.

Mustang was asleep at the back of the tent, just as Ed knew he would be. The soldiers slackened their grip for an instant at the mouth of the tent, and Ed jerked free of them. He loped across the tent unevenly, panting roughly, and just at the edge of the cot his breathing stuttered and his automail knee gave and his flesh knee wobbled and he fell, half on his bed, arms clutching like Louisa's had in desperation.

He couldn't get the pictures out his head. Ed was naïve but he wasn't so naïve that he didn't know what a big, burly Drachman soldier was doing with a very pretty, very young, and very kidnapped Amestrian woman in his tent. He thought of what her final hours must have been like, he thought of how she probably would have lived and been raped and raped and raped but _alive _without Ed's piss poor timing, and he grasped blindly at Mustang's clean white shirt. Mud and blood rubbed off in his throes of misery, desperation – _wake up wake up wake up._

And – Mustang woke with a startled release of air that sent him into a coughing fit. He curled in close to Edward with the force of his coughing, and Edward let out a whining, needy gasp at the closeness.

"Mustang, oh fuck, oh fuck Mustang –"

"E-E-E," Mustang got out his name slowly as the cough quieted, staccato bursts and the most beautiful thing Ed had ever heard. "Edward," he said finally, hands finding him, patting him, touching him. Blessed, blessed warmth that made every life Ed had to give _worth it_ –

"You're bleeding Ed, what are you –? What's going on?"

The guards were on him before the first clear, welling tear had joined the mud and blood. Really, it took them longer than he would have guessed. They jerked him back and bound his hands, still raining spontaneous blows and – the warmth lingered on his hand, tingled at his joints.

It had been worth it.

By the time they decided they were done, the ragged cut had reopened on his head. He kneeled in the center of the med tent panting, one eye swollen shut, blood running freely done his face, hands tied behind his back. Ed awaited his fate with grace, warring tempests within him calmed for just a moment by the warmth and presence and life he was facing. Said life did not display the same grace. Mustang didn't like not knowing what was going on and maybe it was the illness, but he wasn't hiding his panic well. He tossed harried, clumsy Drachman requests at the guards mulling around. He kept looking at Ed like he wanted to touch him again. But they both knew the guards wouldn't take kindly to them conversing, and so they both stewed in their separate solitudes from half a tent away from one another.

Ed's head hurt like a sonuvabitch.

And then there was the General. He strode into the med tent billowing furs behind him, and Ed could see that another blizzard hard started sometime since he'd come in himself. There was none of the good humor Ed had seen on his face earlier –

he looked fucking _pissed_. There were some strange politics going on in this camp, and Ed just knew he had gotten in the way of some of them.

He was horrified when a soldier came in behind him, dragging Louisa's pale, mud-covered body behind him. Her face in his vision warped to Winry, half an hour dead with blue around her lips and a grubby hand buried in her hair. The tips were frozen with the sweat she'd made struggling in her final moments of life.

Ed let out a low, involuntary moan and lowered his head so his bangs skimmed the ground.

But the General would have none of it. Ed heard his boots smacking on the hard earth beneath the flimsy covering of the floor in the med tent, and then there was a hand in his own scraggly hair, roughly foisting his head back until he was struggling to breath and his Adam's apple strained hard in the open air.

His eyes were fierce, his breath was hot, and Ed glared defiantly back with his one open eye. There was a moment of that heavy, hateful tension before the hand released him and he sagged forward without the counterpoint of pressure keeping him up. And then suddenly the General was next to Mustang, and Ed wasn't so confident anymore.

"You tried to escape," he said.

Ed shook his head, slowly.

"Why did you do it then, hm? Leave?"

_I was coming to see him. I needed to see him._

Ed shook his head again. A kick landed on his tender side, and he fell sideways.

"You did leave him?"

Ed shakily hoisted himself up, looked between Mustang's face and this General's, and he knew how this could be misconstrued. Ed's escape was a like a total abandonment of his superior officer, and he was playing into their devotion to each other to tear them apart.

It wouldn't work. He looked at Mustang, and clenched his fists, and it wouldn't work. He shook his head again.

"You have leave him for a woman, and she is dead. And you will come back to him now? The moment she is dead?"

He said, "No." Quiet and venomous.

Mustang said, "Ed, it's okay."

Ed didn't really know what that was supposed to mean. Eyes on Mustang again, he quirked an eyebrow in disbelief, bared his teeth in an incredulous grimace. That could really only mean that Mustang believed the tripe this asshole was feeding him, believed that Ed would actually leave a man that he had sacrificed a whole camp to save, believed that Ed was even capable of physically separating himself from Mustang's comforting presence for some girl that didn't even know ten minutes ago.

But hell, that sounded bad too.

"Fuck, Mustang, what are you saying? You want me to leave?"

"No, of course not. But of course I'd understand if you decided to, of course I wouldn't blame you – "

Unspoken between them was the fundamental truth: with his alchemy, Ed could get away any time he damn well pleased. Mustang was tethering him here, but fuck if Ed thought the tether was half as fragile as Mustang did. Ed's tie was diamond hard and unbreakable, and he wouldn't fold to this bastard's flimsy little –

"Fuck off Mustang, I wouldn't leave you, I'd never leave you, who the hell do you think you're talking to?"

Mustang looked a little alarmed at the outburst, like he'd seen something in Ed's face that surprised him. That he didn't like. That he didn't want to see. Ed wasn't so sure he couldn't feel it there himself, a twitch of hysteria that gave away just a little bit too much of how very serious Ed was. Eyes trained on Mustang, he didn't look back at Louisa's body.

"Kid, I'm only –"

There was a little bedside table by Mustang, on his left side, the side farthest from Ed. The General took their conversation as an opportunity to move it to the side of the bed closest to Ed and stand there silently until Mustang stuttered to a gravelly, rasping halt.

The General said, "You tried to escape."

Ed said, "No."

Two guards were on Mustang before Ed could blink. Big, bulky guards that Ed hadn't even really comprehended the existence of before.

The General said, "You tried to escape."

With slightly more trepidation, Ed said, "No-o." A breathy stutter drew it out long.

Then there was one guard at Mustang's back and one guard extending Mustang's arm toward the hard, cold metal table that the General had placed there. Mustang extended his fingers reflexively, splaying them on the metal in an effort to keep himself balanced against the weight on his back. A third guard manifested behind Ed in the form of a hand in his hair, keeping his eyes trained on the action. It was a testament to Ed's naivety that he didn't even realize what was happening until the General drew a slim-handled hammer from the inside of his fur coat.

Ed screamed, "What the fuck are you doing?" He jerked at the restraints holding his hands together behind his back. He thought briefly of squirming his hands into a position where he could clap, knew what alchemy could do here, but he couldn't. He couldn't, he couldn't. They wouldn't make it far now, clapping would only give away his secret, and Ed didn't really think he had it in him to use alchemy at the moment anyway. But still, a thousand arrays flew through his mind. Painful, skin-flaying, blood-boiling arrays that he'd never even thought before, never even known before. It was almost as frightening as the tableau in front of him –

Mustang's eyes did something strange, going wider than he'd ever seen them, and he curled his fingers back under the fleshy protection of his palm. A final guard appeared, and he splayed Roy's fingers back onto the table until they were going pale and bloodless under the force of the guard's heavy hand. The General stroked the hammer tenderly, Mustang lost any silent dignity he may have had and jerked mightily at the hand holding him down, and Ed took up a breathless, continuous mantra of 'no' under his breath.

"You tried," the General said, running a single, gloved finger delicately up the underside of the hammer, "to escape. And you left him here."

Ed screamed, "NO!" And he had his eyes closed, he must have had his eyes closed or blinked or something, because he missed the lightning fast movement that left Mustang – stoic, brilliant hero-of-Ishbal Mustang – screaming hoarsely. All that Ed saw was red, inflamed, distortedness – a knuckle on Mustang's index finger that looked utterly _wrong_, before another damning statement issued from the General's mouth.

"You left your General for a girl," he said.

Ed bit his lip, and he knew what this answer would do, now. 'No' seemed to be the wrong answer. Denial, an upholding of Ed's very strict moral code, meant pain. 'Yes,' a fundamentally abhorrent thing now, in this situation, given that it meant an abandonment of an attachment he held more dear than his own life, meant that this could maybe end before things got too extreme.

Ed's epitaph carved itself out before his eyes – here lies Ed, he loved too much – and Ed said, "Mustang, you gotta understand –"

That was the wrong answer, and there was an earth-shattering _crack_ as the hammer hit Mustang's middle finger straight on the center knuckle. Roy was coughing too hard by that point to scream, but something obscene roared its way out from the base of his throat in a guttural, primal way on the next wave of stuttering coughs. There was blood flecking his lips when the General repeated his calm, eerie mantra.

"You tried to escape, and you failed. And now you face your General." Ed stayed silent and breathed hard through his nose. "He needs you. Face your abandonment. You are fickle."

Louisa was a cold, hard, unfamiliar lump behind him. She was not Winry. She was no one, and this was her fault.

She was also dead, and that was Ed's. She deserved more respect than this, but he couldn't stop himself denying her.

"She's nothing, I did it for you, I came for –"

Wrong answer. The next _crack_ – his ring finger, his right hand – must have broken something in Mustang, and he screamed, "I don't fucking _care_, Edward, _I don't care_! Say yes, fucking say yes! You left, it's fine, you left, you left –"

"—But…"

"_Just say it!_"

His hand jerked spasmodically against the guards, looking red and tender and swollen and – wrong. There were tears, on Ed's face and Roy's, and the begging was too much. He said, "Yes, I'm sorry, yes." And the admission and what it might mean to Mustang physically tore something within him. Mustang had been buying into their lies, Mustang had believed them – Mustang's belief in Ed was key, Mustang's confidence was absolutely key. If this man, his hope didn't have any confidence in him, how could Ed ever hope to find strength in himself? How could Ed ever really believe that he hadn't truly abandoned Mustang himself?

"You left him."

"Yes."

"Alone."

"_Yes._"

"To defend for himself. Against preventable, painful things." He waggled the hammer in front of his face. "Like this." Then he broke Mustang's thumb.

Ed jolted forward and Mustang jolted back. He clearly hadn't been expecting it after Ed's positive responses, and he'd let himself relax. His thumb jutted at an awkward ninety degrees from its base on his hand.

"For fuck's sake, _stop_, please!"

"Answer!"

"_YES!"_

"You won't leave him to us again."

"No, no."

"You will stay."

"Yes. Yes. Forever, if you like." Mustang was sweating and wheezing and hurting and he thought Ed had left him alone to this. Never, never – he'd be his crutch forever, he wanted nothing more –

They splayed Mustang's left hand to the open air and cracked two more fingers along their sides. He was hiccupping back frantic sobs of pain and nursing two broken hands against his chest by the time they led Edward out of the med tent. He didn't look at Ed as he walked out the door, and it was more final and ultimate and damning than anything.

Under the watchful eye of six burly guards, he spent the evening burying Louisa on the outskirts of camp. The earth was frozen and his hands ungloved, and it took him hours and hours to make a hole even close to deep enough. The guards were drunk by the time they rolled her into the ground, and she fell facedown in an awkward slump at the bottom of the frozen pit.

Shuffling back to his tent between his escorts, Ed nursed blisters from the rough hewn handle of the shovel.

And then, bile rising at the back of his throat, he thought of Mustang – of his broken, swollen, blackened fingers – and he didn't care so much about the blisters anymore.

* * *

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